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. 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 is the author of Ground Water , short listed for the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Guardian First Book Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Examines, with amazing forensic diligence, the context and fraught composition of the most famous poem of the 20th century. S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. Eliot and Ezra Pound left an America sullied, in their opinion, by recent immigrants (my own among them) to emigrate to England believing they could initiate a renaissance in the arts that could save Western civilization itself. Though often plagued by ill-health – nearly all the characters in The Waste Land cough their way through “the brown fog” of London’s winter dawns – the Eliots inhabit their times with surprising physical vigour. Such is the energy and engagement of Hollis in this task that you find yourself rooting for the emergence of the poem along with Eliot and his supporters, willing it into life as the book progresses.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.

As Pound remarked to a friend prior to its publication: “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think justification of the ‘movement’ of our modern experiment since 1900. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. 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 . The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which I would never have written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps, I may be said to have had the life I needed.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.

This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. 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. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind. Hollis sketches deftly the expatriate anxieties of the pair as they endeavour to make tradition new, navigating on the one hand the English elitism of the Woolfs and Bertrand Russell – who betrayed Eliot’s friendship in a brief, cruel affair with Vivien – and on the other American avant garde rivalries with the likes of William Carlos Williams. While well-written and generally interesting ( as, indeed, any decent book covering this fascinating period in English literature is bound to be ), potential readers must be advised that this is certainly not 'A Biography of a Poem' ( I suspect 'publisher-ese' there!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.