Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land

About this book

A groundbreaking new biography of one of the twentieth centurys most important poets On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford presents us with the first volume of a comprehensive account of this poetic genius. Young Eliot traces the life of the twentieth centurys most important poet from his childhood in St. Louis to the publication of his revolutionary poem The Waste Land. Crawford provides readers with a new understanding of the foundations of some of the most widely read poems in the English language through his depiction of Eliots childhoodlaced with tragedy and shaped by an idealistic bookish family in which knowledge of saints and martyrs was taken for grantedas well as through his exploration of Eliots marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood a woman who believed she loved Eliot "in a way that destroys us both." Quoting extensively from Eliots poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews archives and previously undisclosed memoirs Crawford shows how the poets background in Missouri Massachusetts and Paris made him a lightning rod for modernity. Most impressively Young Eliot reveals the way he accessed his inner lifehis anguishes and his fearsand blended them with his omnivorous reading to create his masterpieces "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land. At last we experience T. S. Eliot in all his tender complexity as student and lover penitent and provocateur banker and philosopherbut most of all Young Eliot shows us as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.