Eliot After The Waste Land, Robert Crawford
Eliot After The Waste Land, Robert Crawford
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Eliot After The Waste Land

Author: Robert Crawford

Narrator: Roger Clark

Unabridged: 29 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/13/2024


Synopsis

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, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot. Eliot After "The Waste Land" 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.

About Robert Crawford

Robert Crawford is the author of Scotland's Books and coeditor of The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. A fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, he is the emeritus professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of St Andrews. The Bard, his biography of Robert Burns, was named the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year in 2009. Crawford's seven poetry collections include Testament and Full Volume, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize. He lives in Scotland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Cailean on May 07, 2022

THIS IS big book. In fact, taken with its first volume, Robert Crawford could be said to have produced the definitive biography of TS Eliot. And it’s one that’s sorely needed. If there’s one literary figure of the 20th century in need of some re-evaluation then it’s surely Eliot. From the cliché of t......more

Goodreads review by Toby on August 18, 2022

Bishop Richard Harries in his Church Times review of Eliot after the Wasteland comments that Eliot's life was as extraordinary as his poetry. I beg to differ. Unless you happen to be Byron or Shelley, or had the misfortune to be a poet in the Soviet Union, it is rather unlikely that your life would......more

Goodreads review by Dan on July 20, 2022

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this biography on one of the most creative minds of the twentieth century. Everyone has two faces, one they present to the world and one that is kept for friends, family, those considered family and loved......more

Goodreads review by CPE on June 14, 2022

Robert Crawford, in Eliot After The Waste Land, states he will let Eliot’s life “emerge in its sometimes complex, contradictory messiness”. “Contradictory” is a good description. On the one hand, the traditional perspective of Eliot is that of a dry man in a three-piece suit, whose statements give t......more

Goodreads review by Liam on October 29, 2022

The essential biographical paradox, that what might be of interest to a reader might not have meant much to the subject, is almost erased in an avalanche of detail. Who Tom saw, when, where who he wrote to, who he was in love with, who was in love with him, pass by at breathless speed. It's almost e......more