Book of the Week

The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis

Recommended by Miss McLaughlin

The Waste Land, T.S Eliot’s1922 enigmatic masterpiece is a century old. Written by an American banker in the City of London, Eliot’s poem was revolutionary - full of parody and pastiche, it is famously complex and allusive. Just over 50 years ago the Berg Collection - a treasure chest of notes and annotations by the poet, his friend Ezra Pound, and his first wife, Vivien - was published, igniting interest and allowing readers to better understand the poem as a living thing. 

50 years later, Mathew Hollis’ book, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem furthers the idea that we should approach the poem as we would a person. The British Library suggest that the book, 'present[s] a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and illuminating new research ... [Hollis] reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists - of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work.' 

Eliot and his first wife, Vivien [Photo: BBC/Oxford Films/The T S Eliot Foundation]

Eliot himself said that poem was 'only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life'. His chilling recollections located the core of the poem in the 'nightmare agony' of his awful marriage. On Vivien’s insistence he removed the line, 'The ivory men make company between us' as it seemed too brutal a reflection on the state of their relationship. A few years before his death, Eliot penned the poem (for the last time) to raise money for a British library and returned the line. 

Over half term, the British Library ran an event to celebrate this anniversary and the publication of Mathew Hollis’ book: you can find out more about the event here. There was a reading of the poem by Viggo Mortensen, and discussions with Jude Rodgers - who presented a documentary on Radio 4 Hold on Tight: The Women of The Waste Land, which is available on BBC Sounds here.  The opening part of The Waste Land is titled 'The Burial of the Dead' and Hollis’ book begins in 1918, with the armistice on the western front in a landscape haunted by the ghosts of millions of victims of war, and goes on to describe the impact of the influenza pandemic that ravaged an exhausted postwar world. His writing is sharp and illuminating and offers a perspective on this most complicated of poems. 

We are Making a New World by Paul Nash (1918)

As part of his research on the poem, Hollis visited the various locations in which Eliot wrote fragments of The Waste Land, including the Nayland Rock Promenade Shelter on Margate Sands, where he penned much of his as then unnamed poem, and the nearby amusement arcade which had opened the summer before Eliot’s visit in the Autumn of 1921. Hollis notes that the name of this arcade was 'Dream Land' and speculates about the impact of seeing - indeed almost sitting under - this phrase daily as he suffered with ill-health alongside his wife Vivien. 

The Nayland Rock Promenade Shelter, Margate [Photo: Thanet District Council/PA Wire/Press Associated Images]

After Eliot’s death in 1965, Pound urged people to “READ HIM” having in mind the long poem he helped deliver into the world. Nearly 60 years later, Hollis’ book echoes the same message. 

If you want to read more, the anniversary of the publication is also marked by two other publications: 
the second volume of Robert Crawford’s wonderful biography of the poet (Eliot After the Waste Land), and Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl. 

This is based on the new trove of 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Emily Hale, the drama teacher he fell in love with while at Harvard in 1912, who became his confidante and lover again in the 1930s. Those letters cast some retrospective light on Eliot’s own sense of the creation of his era-defining poem. 'I was never quite a whole man,' Eliot wrote to Hale. '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.'