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The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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This richly analytical book locates the poem's genesis in the aftermath of the first world war and the "nightmare agony" of Eliot's disastrous marriage. Like the 434-line poem, this book immerses the reader in the political, social and cultural themes of the day . When Eliot included a fragment of that marital neurosis in The Waste Land – “My nerves are bad tonight.

It has seen the second volume of Robert Crawford’s beautifully weighted biography of the poet ( Eliot After the Waste Land) and also, this month, the publication of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl.Towards the end of Pound’s life, Hollis records, he told his daughter: “I should have listened to the Possum”, his nickname for Eliot. It is also clear that Eliot’s occasional drift into anti Semitic passages are ugly and reprehensible. In his “London Letter”, written for the American review The Dial in July 1921, Eliot noted: “The vacant term of wit set in early this year with a fine hot rainless spring. In this gripping account, award-winning biographer Matthew Hollis reconstructs the making of the poem and brings its times vividly to life.

By the end of Hollis’s narrative, Joyce has published Ulysses, Eliot The Waste Land, and Pound has quit England, well on his way to an exile that would include his arrest by Allied forces for broadcasting from fascist Italy and incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane.Beyond that, as you would expect in a book by a professional poet, the writing alone makes it enjoyable . I have poured over its meaning and consulted most of its references in an effort to understand it more and more.

Before his shameful seduction by fascism, Pound was clearly among the most selfless egomaniacs going. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions: Eliot’s into redemptive stardom, Vivien’s into despair, Pound’s into unforgiving darkness.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The evolution of those pages – Pound striking out the whole first section, Vivien’s remarks on English idioms – have become folkloric among Eliot’s readers, but still Hollis invests them with fresh life. He tells the story of the cultural and personal trauma that forged the poem through the interleaved lives of its protagonists – of Ezra Pound, who edited it, of Vivien Eliot, who endured it, and of T.

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