The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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Hollis brilliantly sifts through the tendrils of TS Eliot's unhappiness and shows how, with help from friends, he broke through his tortured silence to create an era-defining poem . Matthew Hollis’s book is deeply and brilliantly concerned with all the tendrils of that unhappiness, and Eliot’s triumphant creative response to it.

S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. Examines, with amazing forensic diligence, the context and fraught composition of the most famous poem of the 20th century. It’s a testament to his own talent at dissecting his subject matter and infusing it with imaginative empathy that the reader comes away from his “biography” ready to look at The Waste Land with fresh eyes. Now All Roads Lead to France: the Last Years of Edward Thomas (published by Faber, in 2011) won the Costa Biography Award and was Sunday Times Biography of the Year. The drought of early summer had not given up – every day in the first week of October, Hollis notes, was unseasonably hot; “the desert year”, as it came to be known.But Matthew Hollis does a fantastic job of shining a spotlight on how much of Eliot's emotion and personal crisis he laid on paper to give us what we still read and love 100 years later.

Those familiar with both the city and the poem know “The Wasteland” was also conceived there—in fact underwent much of its gestation under the city’s influence. If you are a devotee of twentieth century poetry, you are almost certain to understand The Waste Land in greater depth. Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. He reports the antisemitism that disfigured Eliot’s and Pound’s work, without minimising or mitigating it, as they did, and he is alive to the egotism that also resulted in professional missteps and personal cruelties.Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.

Matthew Hollis’s new book is not another literary study of The Waste Land nor is it merely a biography of Eliot and Pound. Entrusted with the gift by Pound but forbidden from knowing its contents, Eliot, alongside his fellow traveller Wyndham Lewis, ceremoniously presented the package as the trio assembled at a Left Bank hotel and waited as Joyce struggled with its strings until, for want of a knife, a pair of nail scissors was found. It's a testament to his own talent at dissecting his subject matter and infusing it with imaginative empathy that the reader comes away from his "biography" ready to look at The Waste Land with fresh eyes. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis.

In this gripping account, award-winning biographer Matthew Hollis reconstructs the making of the poem and brings its times vividly to life. S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. He sifts and rakes over the dead ground of the poet’s broken relationship with his American parents, his disastrous infertile marriage, and the no man’s land of London decimated by Spanish flu after the great war. So you learn about all of the marital strain and health concerns of Eliot’s wife Vivien, Eliot’s own mental troubles and Pound’s sense that modern capitalism was ruining society and his turn to a nutty, yet still dangerous, embrace of Fascism. He charts Eliot’s peculiar upbringing in St Louis, Missouri, his conflicted relationship with his mother and the horror that was his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, who lived almost the last decade of her life in a psychiatric hospital.