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. 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.

At times he has you looking over Eliot’s shoulder, in Margate and in a subsequent mental health clinic in Lausanne, as the words progress slowly on the white pages. brings to life the exciting, even overheated, creative environment in which the poem came into being . 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.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. Matthew Hollis’s new book is not another literary study of The Waste Land nor is it merely a biography of Eliot and Pound. It’s odd that someone so essentially an American who remained one should put on the mantle of an Englishman. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life.

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. And “a new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”.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. 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. What it is, essentially, is a narrative of the autobiographical elements that Eliot would pen and Pound edit into the great poem. 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.

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: Eliot’s into redemptive stardom, Vivien’s into despair, Pound’s into unforgiving darkness. Matthew Hollis is the author of Ground Water, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. 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.

If you are looking for the 'origin story' of 'The Waste Land', then this is certainly for you; however, be aware that by the time the poem has been completed within the narrative, the book effectively closes. 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.

He reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists — Ezra Pound, who edited it; Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and T. In this gripping account, award-winning biographer Matthew Hollis reconstructs the making of the poem and brings its times vividly to life. 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. Meticulously grounding his account in time and place and paying close attention to the interplay of poetic intuition and critical mind, Hollis succeeds in gripping our attention. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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.