Young Eliot
From St Louis to The Waste Land
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Publisher Description
Published simultaneously in Britain and America to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot, this major biography traces the life of the twentieth century’s most important poet from his childhood in the ragtime city of St Louis right up to the publication of his most famous poem, The Waste Land. Meticulously detailed and incisively written, Young Eliot portrays a brilliant, shy and wounded American who defied his parents’ wishes and committed himself to life as an immigrant in England, authoring work astonishing in its scope and hurt.
Quoting extensively from poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews, archives, and previously undisclosed memoirs, Robert Crawford shows how Eliot’s background in Missouri, Massachusetts and Paris made him a lightning conductor for modernity. Most impressively, Young Eliot shows how deeply personal were the experiences underlying masterpieces from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot wanted no biography written, but this book reveals him in all his vulnerable complexity as student and lover, stink-bomber, banker and philosopher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing extensively on new interviews, original research, and previously undisclosed memoirs, biographer Crawford (Scotland's Books) offers the first book devoted to T.S. Eliot's youth, painting a vividly colorful portrait of the artist as a young man. In exhaustive, and often exhausting, detail, Crawford chronicles, year-by-year, the young Eliot: his childhood, divided between St. Louis and Massachusetts; his painful shyness and love of dancing; his years at Harvard, his post-Harvard experiences in Europe and first, though unrequited, love ; his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood; and his early publications of poetry, leading up to The Waste Land's release in 1922. Eliot's affinity for the sacred is traced to his upbringing in an "idealistic, bookish household," to his keen ear for St. Louis's rich confluence of music both opera and jazz and to his love of birdsong. Readers also learn about Eliot's difficult marriage to Haigh-Wood, which brought neither of them happiness, though Eliot wrote to Ezra Pound that "it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land." Crawford's masterly biography, with its great depth, attention to detail, and close reading of the youthful Eliot's writings, is likely to become the definitive account of the great poet's early years.
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