Eliot After "The Waste Land"
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" was hailed as “exceptional” and “assiduous” (The New York Times). Robert Crawford’s meticulous, incisive scholarship continues in Eliot After "The Waste Land", an invaluable record of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man.
After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Drawing on these intimate exchanges and on countless interviews and archives, as well as on Eliot’s own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot. Eliot After “The Waste Land”, the long-awaited second volume of Crawford’s magisterial, meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most significant poet, tells the story of the mature Eliot during his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, including his complex interior life.
Chronicling Eliot’s 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 shows us the public and personal experiences that helped inspire Eliot’s later masterpieces. Crawford describes the poet’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and his happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his Nobel Prize, his great work Four Quartets, and his adventures in the theater.
Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as husband, lover, and widower; as banker, editor, playwright, and publisher; and most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art amid 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.
