The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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Matthew Hollis’s new book is not another literary study of The Waste Land nor is it merely a biography of Eliot and Pound.

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. The Waste Land lends itself so well to this kind of social narrative because it was almost a collective project. 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.Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Towards the end of Pound’s life, Hollis records, he told his daughter: “I should have listened to the Possum”, his nickname for Eliot. 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. Before his shameful seduction by fascism, Pound was clearly among the most selfless egomaniacs going.

This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. 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. Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. Well written summery of Eliot’s background plus a technical, poetical explanation of the Waste Land; also incorporating the major literary figures in Elliot’s circle like Ezra Pound etc.Matthew Hollis is the author of Ground Water, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry.

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.

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.

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 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. But it was not, as Matthew Hollis’s captivatingly exhaustive “biography of a poem” demonstrates, a work conceived or executed in isolation; and chief among Eliot’s enablers were his wife, Vivien, and his fellow poet and indefatigable literary fixer, Ezra Pound, who looms almost as large in the book as does Eliot himself.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.