This fascinating and brilliantly researched history will delight Eliot’s fans. The biographer and poet (who is also an editor at Faber & Faber) explores the context of. It has been labelled the most truthful poem of its time it. direction.” The book gains traction when Eliot gets to the actual writing of the poem, as Hollis describes the laborious early drafts and deleted lines, as well as the sections he completed “almost whole, with barely any correction.” Hollis’s sharp prose sings and is poetic in its own right, and images of typeset pages and manuscripts in Eliot’s handwriting help bring the work to life. It is said to describe the moral decay of a world after war, to find meaning in a meaningless era. A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom a dissolute prophet of war. Hollis also traces Pound’s influence in several of Eliot’s poems and examines in detail how The Waste Land was shaped by Pound’s editorial eye and “perceptive. A waste land: inside the weird and miserable world of TS Eliot. Hollis allots great attention to Ezra Pound, who, he argues, is essential in a consideration of Eliot, as the “confluence that existed between the minds of the two poets” was central to Eliot’s work. To tell the life story of this poem, Hollis tells the story of the poet, sometimes minute by minute. The Waste Land helped to define modernism and lives on vividly into our present day. Searching out the pieces “of the jigsaw puzzle that would become The Waste Land,” Hollis blends rich characterization and historical background to create a vivid picture of the London literary scene from the end of WWI to 1922 that takes in the writers, journals, and publishers that influenced Eliot’s work. Hilary Davies: Whispers of Immortality - The Gloucester Notebook by T S Eliot (Edited by Robert Hyde) The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew. The poem is brilliant, infuriating, moody, conflicted, lyrical, fractured, wildly inventive, haunted by tradition, and as full of eroticism as lament. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, biographer Hollis ( Now All Roads Lead to France) offers an illuminating account of the making of The Waste Land. Matthew Hollis, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem Faber & Faber, 2022, 544 pp.

The waste land a biography of a poem