Eliot After The Waste Land
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources.
In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale.
This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After 'The Waste Land', tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life.
From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces.
He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets.
Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Nobel-winning poet and playwright Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) claws his way out of modernist despondency in this revelatory biography from Crawford (after Young Eliot). The author surveys the American-born Eliot's life in London after the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, sharply dissecting the tensions between the public acclaim he received and his private turmoil and angst, with his political conservatism (and antisemitism), and in the moral certitudes of the Anglican Church, which he embraced in a religious turn that baffled other modernist literati. Eliot had a rough marriage with the mentally unstable Vivien Haigh-Wood; a passionate affair with Emily Hale (Crawford makes good use of their recently released letters), whom he refused to marry; and a brief but happy marriage to the much younger Esme Valerie Fletcher. Braiding piquant detail with rich analysis ("In his life, he worried about his hernia; in his poetry, he turned again to structuring an account of modern existence on an ancient fertility ritual... balanced between feverish action and strict control"), Crawford illuminates the contradictions that make Eliot such a fascinating symbol of his times. The result is a rewarding look at a key literary figure. Photos.
