Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land

Eliot #1

by Robert Crawford

A groundbreaking new biography of one of the twentieth century's 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 century's 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 Eliot's childhood―laced with tragedy and shaped by an idealistic, bookish family in which knowledge of saints and martyrs was taken for granted―as well as through his exploration of Eliot's marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a woman who believed she loved Eliot "in a way that destroys us both."
Quoting extensively from Eliot's poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews, archives, and previously undisclosed memoirs, Crawford shows how the poet's background in Missouri, Massachusetts, and Paris made him a lightning rod for modernity. Most impressively, Young Eliot reveals the way he accessed his inner life―his anguishes and his fears―and 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 philosopher―but most of all, Young Eliot shows us as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature, Unfinished, Literary Criticism, Literary Fiction

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 29, 2015

About the author

Robert Crawford FRSE FBA (b. 1959) is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.

Reviews

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family. He moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25. He settled, worked, and married there. He became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship. Eliot was not only a poet, but also a playwright, literary critic and editor. He is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry and as the author of the poems The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).

This book follows Eliot’s life through 1922 and the publication of The Waste Land. It is thorough, detailed and academic in style. It presents an insightful analysis of Eliot’s poetry. It shows that The Waste Land mirrors Eliot’s own life experiences. The book is both a biography and a study of literary analysis. Both his undergraduate and graduate studies, as well as how he supported himself are covered. T.S. Eliot was extremely well educated! The depth and scope of his education is both impressive and fascinating!

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land is intended as the first of two books. The second details the years after 1922 and Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale, a friend of his cousin, whom he met and fell in love with at the age of seventeen. His letters to her have been under lock and key at Princeton University’s Firestone Librart until only recently. In 2020, the content of these 1,131 letters have been made public. To my knowledge, Robert Crawford’s second book has not yet been published.

Why do I give the book four stars? Despite its academic style, it is not esoteric. The writing is clear and well formulated. The telling moves forward chronologically. Equal attention is given to Eliot’s work and familial bonds. He and his wife’s ambivalent relationship as well as their respective personality traits are focused upon. We learn of the difficulties that fraught his marital relationship. Health and psychological problems abound. Financial constraints play in too. All relevant aspects of his life are covered in a clear and straightforward manner.

The book contains a huge amount of information concerning other authors writing at the turn of the 20th century. Extremely interesting tidbits revealing how they viewed each other and their work makes this book a treasure trove for booklovers. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, James Joyce, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, Herman Hesse, Jerome K. Jerome, Arnold Bennett, E.E. Cummings, J.M. Barrie are but some of the many Eliot associated with. There is a lot here about Bertrand Russel and Ezra Pound! We read about the literary journals and publishing establishments of the time.

We read of those authors and books Eliot was shaped by. We come to understand why they were important to him. Edgar Allan Poe he read while waiting at the dentist. Another two influential authors were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Rudyard Kipling, particularly Captains Courageous. Tom spent his summers sailing along the coast of Massachusetts and Maine. His family’s New England heritage irrevocably shaped him. Shy and reserved, bullied by classmates, Tom was sensitive about the size of his ears, and so Edmond Rostand’s story Cyrano de Bergerac, with his monstrous nose, spoke to him too. Through personal details one comes to understand Eliot both as a boy and later as a man. A comprehensive picture of T.S. Eliot is drawn.

How Eliot felt being an expatriate living in Europe particularly intrigued me. The sense that one remains a foreigner is striking. This is discussed both in relation to Henry James and Eliot. Having myself emigrated, the topic interests me.

The book does not shy away from discussing the antisemitic views that were a part of Eliot’s upbringing. Asked if he was antisemitic, his reply was no. Nevertheless, one cannot deny the antisemitic influence.

Mark Elstob narrates the audiobook extremely well. I smiled at his personification of Bertrand Russel’s lines. It is such a delight when every single word spoken is crystal clear, as it is here! The French is well narrated too. Five stars for the narration.

This book could have been abstruse, but it isn’t. It is well organized, objectively written, interesting and not difficult to follow. I have no complaints. I highly recommend this book because I have found T.S. Eliot to be such an interesting person.




***********************

*The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse TBR by Lyndall Gordon
*Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land 4 stars by Robert Crawford
*Eliot After "The Waste Land" TBR by Robert Crawford (Thanks, R.C.!)

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been decades since the last biography of T. S. Eliot. We forget--or I forgot--that a long time ago Peter Ackroyd published one and later Lyndall Gordon produced a 2-volume life. Do you remember" Of course you do and now you're realizing it seems a lifetime ago. There's a reason. Eliot didn't want a biography written, unrealistic as that wish seems today. His wife Valerie, keeper of the flame after his death in 1965, acceded to that wish by withholding access to materials and limiting what Ackroyd and Gordon could quote. Still, their biographies were exciting because they were all we had. Obviously there was persistent interest in Eliot, though. For the most part the resulting works, like the play and movie Tom and Viv which depicted him as a misogynist or other works which dealt with his anti-Semitism or claimed him to be a closeted homosexual, disappointed Valerie Eliot and hardened her resolve to stand in the way of serious biographical studies. Now Valerie is gone. Robert Crawford, who knew her and had impressed her with his academic work on the poet has used the relaxed restraints on research and access to the material to write the first biography since Gordon's.

Young Eliot is right. The story of Eliot in London is a familiar one. But whereas most biographies race quickly over the formative years, Crawford spends three chapters and 78 pages in detailing Eliot's boyhood in St Louis and Gloucester, Massachusetts because he's able to demonstrate how influences of those years were later used in his greatest poetry. Another five chapters and abut 120 pages are needed to get him through Harvard, after which he studies at Oxford, meets Vivien, his first wife, and the rest is famous literary history. All of this material, though, is new because it's not before been covered in such detail. While I was aware, for instance, that he'd studied philosophy at Harvard, I hadn't known before of his deep background in anthropology and how it would affect The Waste Land, the Sweeney poems, and his criticism.

Equally important parts of Eliot's story, and heavy influences on what he wrote, were the one who got away, Emily Hale, and the one who wanted him and married him, Vivien Haigh-Wood. One of the surprises for me was that Crawford mutes the difficulties of the marriage. While he allows they were awkward together the way he writes of the marriage makes Tom much more supportive and accommodating than perhaps we'd believed before. Of course, this first volume ends at the end of 1922, and Tom and Viv have some trying years ahead of them.

There's the poetry, too. No biography of Eliot could not discuss and analyze "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land. Crawford writes in depth about where they came from within the poet and why, as well as lengthy discussions of the Sweeney sequence, "Gerontion", and other early works.

This is grand biography. Crawford plans a second volume to be called Eliot after The Waste Land. I'm sure that when it's published Crawford's will be the Eliot biography for our time.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

The shelving, status updates and star rating constitute how I felt about this book.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Honestly, the main thing that cost this the star was the fact that Crawford describes T.S. Eliot as "Tom." Constantly. Literally on every page. Like, that's how he talks about him on every single page. He has some bullshit reason, like making Eliot seem intimate to us or whatever, but this is bullshit because it just seems creepy, distracting, and weirdly voyeuristic, especially when you consider in this period (up to The Waste Land), even Ezra Pound called him "T.S.E.", and the main people who called him Tom were his family and his wife. It is just so distracting, and I'm not sure if this kind of "cosiness" is really the point of biography. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just saying I'm not sure.

(Incidentally, I saw Eliot's childhood pictures in Kings' archive and it's weird as hell. Baby Eliot looks like a puppet, and his eyes appear - at least to me - to be very out of proportion. He just looks like a very shrunken version of his grownup self and that is weird. Perhaps I shouldn't be lecturing Crawford on overfamiliarity when I got an archivist to show me Eliot's family pictures.)

There's also a tendency towards over-interpretation or clumsy linkings, which would be okay but this book seems somewhat confused as to whether it's a critical book or an autobiography. As an autobiography, it's really very good, but its weird forays into clunking into random bits of young Eliot's poetry often don't flow quite right.

Buuuuut...with all that said -- this book is invaluable to anyone doing an Eliot dissertation/long piece of work, especially if you're focusing on Eliot's early work (as I have this year). If your library doesn't have good resources or whatever, I seriously advise you to invest in this book. You don't necessarily have to listen to some of the stuff Crawford throws into the mix (in fact, I would suggest that you didn't), but the sheer volume of details, fragments, cuttings, and official documentation he's presumably scoured the globe (?) to find is...extraordinary. There's also a fantastic selection of the letters to choose from, if you can't face combing through around 10,000 pages (I'm not even exaggerating that much) of his letters to find the diamonds. So, yeah, do buy, but I would strongly advise you not to listen - but, thanks, Crawford, for the amazing amount of original research and compiling. Saved me this year.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

TS Eliot from birth to The Waste Land. Hardly a detail has been left out, filling in many gaps usually ignored about Eliot's childhood, education, first sad marriage, and early poetry. If you love Eliot as I do--the first place I heard of a mysterious substance called curry or the elegant name Lavinia or the word scenario or the wonderful silly English repartee--"The only person I ever met who could hear the cry of bats. Hear the cry of bats? He could hear the cry of bats. Buts how do you know he could hear the cry of bats? Because he said so, and I believed him, But if he was so . . . harmless, how could you believe him? He might have imagined it. My darling Celia, you needn't be so skeptical. I *stayed* there once, at their castle in the North. How he suffered. They had to find an island for him where there were no bats."

We have to wait until 2020 when the letters of the American girl he was really in love with but who wouldn't have him will be made public for the second volume. Meanwhile read this and listen to the wonderful recording, if it still exists, of The Cocktail Party, from which the above is excerpted, with Alec Guiness as Alexander MacColgie Gibbs.

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Crawford makes very good use of recently released materials, including letters by Eliot and by others to him, to show the vital importance of his growing-up years in St. Louis and Cape Ann to his poetry, not just his Unitarian and privileged upbringing, but also his social shyness and sexual self-doubt. Crawford is probably right that Eliot wrote his best poetry when he was in crisis, whether sexual or health-wise. The rest of the time he was too busy being the responsible machine to his wife, family, bank job and literary journalism. This part of his life is almost unbearable to read, the steeling of the self against tremendous pressures. He and Vivienne should never have gotten married, but if they did not, he would have gone back from Oxford to America and become a philosophy professor, not a poet. She believed in his poetic genius, and that must count for a very great deal. I learned a great deal from this conscientious biography. The style is unnecessarily convoluted in places.

[Warwick Stubbs]

This biography deserves 5 stars for the depth of research and nonjudgmental understanding of a shy boy growing into manhood, and showing where many of his influences and descriptive language derives from - especially since so much actually does come from his formative years. However, I simply can't invest my reading time into so many pages detailing many passages of life that aren't all that interesting (to me). Once I started skipping paragraphs, I started skipping pages, and by then I realised that this book isn't for me, regardless of how much I love Eliot's poetry!

[Steph De Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm an ardent Eliot devotee, so while immersing myself in a 500+ biography (the first of two volumes!) of the poet's life absolutely is my idea of a good time, I appreciate that the experience may not have wide appeal.

Despite my bias, however, I think Crawford does an excellent job of portraying the poet's early life. Meticulously researched, this biography evokes a vivid sense of the enigmatic poet's character and the early-life experiences that shaped him and his work. I particularly appreciate the fact that Crawford pays significant attention to the poems themselves, rather simply the biographical details of their author.

Conversely, I think he spends rather too much time on Eliot’s childhood, explaining minor details in great depth. Presumably, this is partly because the period constitutes a gap in existing Eliot biographies - and as such, supplies this book's raisin d’etre - and partly to fill out two volumes.

Further, the decision to refer to Eliot as “Tom” throughout the narrative is likely to be divisive: I support the author's assertion that this helps to humanise, and distinguish from the literary colossus, the anxious, passionate, bibliophilic young man who is the subject of this biography. Others may, however, find the choice displeasing.

For my part, I loved learning more about Eliot's inspirations and interests, and found particular joy in certain points of intersection with my own. I'm already excited to read the second volume.

[Sandra Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

T. S. Eliot is one of my favorite poets, so reading Part 1 of this new biography, which promised more detail on his life from the beginning in St. Louis to the publishing of "The Waste Land," intrigued me.

The book delivers its promise: the details are, at times, excruciating to the point of obscuring the bigger picture. There is such a thing as a balance between detail and the big picture and the author doesn't achieve that balance as well as he should have or could have (my hope is that Part II will be different).

However, having said that, for anyone who is intrigued by or enjoys the depth and intensity of Eliot's poetry (and essays - he is perhaps one of the most perceptive literary critics ever and his essays do an excellent job of delineating and explaining the creative process in all the areas that come into play when we write, and they are many), this is an insightful behind-the-scenes look at how Eliot became the writer he was.

I was most intrigued by Eliot's intellectual genius. He devoured learning in every subject and, most incredibly, retained it and used it to write. In spite of being involved in many things at one time, including having a fairly important position at Lloyd's of London (he was in charge of handling the debts incurred by each of the European countries involved in World War I after the Treaty of Versailles), he had a unique ability to compartmentalize each thing and develop it in its compartment.

It wasn't without a cost, however, and many things in Eliot's life - some of them very bad choices that he made - led to poor health and mental fatigue and depression that he battled frequently.

In the end, though, the good and the bad - that of his own making and that which surrounded him personally and globally - fed into some of the most intriguing poetry ever written.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional half-biography. All that one could hope for is here - I particularly enjoy the details of ten-year-old Tom's 'Fireside' newspaper in St. Louis, and Crawford's exceptional work upon so much of what the dear old young man was reading. Crawford hasn't set himself an easy task - it's not easy to write an entertaining biography of a man who spent >90% of his time at a desk. Young Eliot is a very heartfelt, emotional (as well as intellectual) glimpse at these fragile lives.

To simulate the last half (Tom and Viv in London), one must grow accustomed to the refrain 'Tom/Vivian fell ill again'. Repeat this every other page. It's genuinely staggering how often one could fall ill at the time.

[Ashley Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, this book is. not. great. It picks up around the time Tom meets Ezra Pound and marries his first wife. Be warned, though, that I had exhausted my library renewal opportunities before reaching the middle of the book. The first half is a lengthy catalog of things Eliot read in his youth. While filled with details valuable to the serious Eliot scholar, a more abridged version of his biography would be suitable (and more enjoyable) to most.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
A new biography of TS Eliot by Robert Crawford, and abridged by Katrin Williams, is published to mark 50 years since the poet's death.

[Jonathon Keeler]

“[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.”

Young Eliot tells the story of T.S. Eliot’s life from his birth in St. Louis up until the publication of "The Waste Land". The actual events of Eliot’s life during this time really aren’t all that extraordinary – and shouldn’t make for such a thrilling read. We learn about his boyhood in turn-of-the-century St. Louis (what a city!), his summers in New England, his education at Harvard, and his eventual move to England where he remained. When this book leaves off, he has a job at a bank, health problems, a terrible marriage, and on the whole a fairly ordinary life for his time and station. But he is also publishing poems that define his century (and probably the one after).

The author of Young Eliot, Robert Crawford, as a poet and critic himself, was well equipped to write this. His shared vocations with Eliot give him a deeper understanding of Eliot’s gifts, and he displays them well throughout the book, transposing them to a lay understanding, without resorting to writing a hagiography. That being said, the primary focus is on Eliot the man, not the poetry itself.

What makes this book so thrilling is the meticulous development of the intellectual life of Eliot such that the writing of "The Waste Land" feels inevitable. The highly educated Eliot, steeped in verse from a young age, who pursued philosophy at the highest level, studied Eastern thought and languages as much as Western, worked as a banker, professor, and critic, became a covered pot of water that boiled over with The Waste Land.

I’m looking forward to reading the second volume, Eliot after The Waste Land. Get me to them quartets, Bob!

[N.L. Brisson · Rating 4 out of 5]

T. S. Eliot was a poet that I fell in love with the very first time I read his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem with images and rhythms which did not exist in the sonnets and odes from our text, Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1 (which had many poems I also enjoyed). Recently I saw that a new book had been published by Robert Crawford with the title Young Eliot: from St. Louis to The Waste Land. This book did not turn out to be an easy read. It is an academic book. It seems that Robert Crawford is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. He is a Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St. Andrews, a scholar and a poet. Although this does not have the permissions necessary to be an official biography it is quite scholarly with plenty of attributions. In fact the chapters offer so many numbered footnote references that you must learn to filter them out so that you can follow the details of Eliot’s life.

Since T. S. Eliot destroyed almost all correspondence from his first marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood most biographies devote very few pages to Eliot’s life before he reached his twenties. Crawford, however, following exhaustive research at the many repositories which hold Eliot memorabilia and with the permission of Eliot’s second wife who was still alive, begins at the beginning in St. Louis, Missouri which he credits with the jazz-like rhythms of Eliot’s poetry (not his exact language). “Eliot’s formative years were exactly that. Their importance is greater than most readers have realized. Young Eliot presents this crucial period in much more detail. ‘Home is where we start from’”, says Crawford. “…St. Louis – that French-named city of ragtime, racial tensions, ancient civilisations, riverboats and (in Eliot’s words) the real start of the Wild West.”

Another important early influence on T. S. Eliot is added in his early teens when his “time [is] divided between education in Missouri and summering in Gloucester, Massachusetts” where he learns to sail. T. S. Eliot, once he leaves to go to Harvard, never goes home to St. Louis, although he still summers in New England.

Crawford spends much time on Eliot’s life with Vivien and the dysfunctional nature of their marriage. Vivien is quoted as saying, “I love Tom in a way that destroys us both.” They seem to have sexual difficulties but apparently there is not enough remaining information to tell us the true nature of these difficulties. Crawford blames both of them for the tensions in the marriage. The Eliots live in England (Vivien is English) and they both spend a lot of time being ill, but they also socialize with the important literary figures of their age, both in England and in Paris, e.g. Virginia Woolf, Mary Hutchinson, Conrad Aiken, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Bertrand Russell. Tom reads voraciously in Eastern philosophy and religion, anthropology, Western philosophy and religion, psychology, literary criticism, and literature including drama, novels, and poetry from the classics to his contemporaries. He says about himself that he is “…in different places and circumstances a professor, a journalist, a banker, a philosopher, a Parisian flâneur and also something much wilder.”

Despite the plethora of attributions Crawford still is left to conjecture about how much of Tom’s possible sexual difficulties and his buttoned-down formal persona (which he could discard when he was with male companions) informs the poem that this book ends with, The Waste Land. I am not sure that all of Crawford’s research gave him anything definitive to add to our understanding of T. S. Eliot's poetry, but we do get to know Thomas Stearns Eliot as a person with all his brilliance, his humor, his gloom, and his flaws. There are still enough things we probably don’t know about Young Eliot to leave some mysteries that might be solved in the future. Crawford plans to follow up with a second volume but it will pick up after the publication of The Waste Land.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now that T. S. Eliot’s letters have been published and much other archival material has come to light, Robert Crawford felt it was time to write a new biography of the poet and critic. Young Eliot is the first volume of this new project, covering Eliot’s life up to the publication of The Waste Land in 1923. (The second volume, covering the rest of his life, is planned for after the release of his correspondence with Emily Hale, kept under embargo at Princeton until 2020.)

The biography relies heavily on the first volume of T. S. Eliot’s collected letters, so for particularly obsessive Eliot fans who worked through that, a great many of the details will seem already familiar. Nonetheless, there are two particular aspects of Eliot’s life that Crawford’s biography presents in a significant new detail. One, Crawford traces Eliot’s reading at Harvard. It is interesting how much of precisely this period of his education and reading for pleasure was later incorporated into The Waste Land, and this allows a fresh reading of that poem as a rather nostalgic look back at younger days from a time he was wracked with torment – Crawford depicts vividly the amount of overwork Eliot was engaged in these years which led predictably to his nervous collapse.

Secondly, while it had been known that the philosopher Bertrand Russell carried out an affair with Eliot’s wife Vivien Haigh-Wood shortly after the Eliots’ marriage, Crawford is able to show just how long this tryst lasted and how deeply entwined Vivien and Russell’s lives were during this time. Eliot was undoubtedly aware of everything that had happened, but bore this burden silently. Incidentally, the latter half of this book is not a “Tom and Viv” story – a tale of two spouses that feuded and tortured each other. Rather, they seem to have been living in a stable marriage during this time, albeit one where each was a nervous wreck, and their real falling out must be saved for the second volume of this biography.

In spite of this detail on certain aspects of Eliot’s life, there are lacunae as there often are in biographies. Crawford does not go into Eliot’s doctoral studies in philosophy on the thought of F.H. Bradley, which must be considered a major part of his life because it occupied him for at least a year and resulted in a lengthy dissertation. Perhaps Crawford, a scholar of literature, felt unequipped to tackle such matters of philosophy. Furthermore, I found myself frustrated by Crawford’s focus on only one or two Eliot poems for each portion of his life (e.g. “Prufrock”, “Gerontion”, The Waste Land) and his attempt to link the details recounted to this particular poem; Eliot wrote a great deal of poetry in these years, but Crawford doesn’t actually engage with much of it.

There are also some factual errors or misunderstandings. Crawford writes of Eliot being able to read the Buddha’s Fire Sermon in the “original Sanskrit”, but it was in fact written in Pali. Crawford also claims that Eliot’s reading of Xenophon’s Anabasis as a young man later aided him in translating Saint-John Perse’s Anabase, but the two works have nothing in common except their titles. The cigar brand Romeo y Julieta is referred to as “Romeo and Juliet cigars” – a minor quibble, perhaps, but a sign that more peer review might have been helpful.

[David Withun · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Crawford's two biographies of Eliot in the wrong order, and was surprised at the difference in style. Young Eliot is a far more conventional biography than part two. Part two obviously benefits from access to Eliot's correspondence with Emily Hale which would have been unavailable when part one was being written.

Both move at an impressive speed, amassing an almost overwhelming amount of detail. The thought of how much reading Crawford must have put himself through is daunting. Nor does he avoid aspects of his subject that make modern readers uncomfortable.

He is fond of pointing out how extra-ordinary Eliot's learning was, 'No western Poet of his era was more professionally schooled in traditional Indic and Japanese thought', 'No other twentieth century poet was so thoroughly and strenuously educated'. Most readers of Eliot have the impression that they are encountering a formidable intelligence. What Young Eliot does is track Eliot's education and substantiate that impression. Reading Ezra Pound, one is never sure whether to accept Pound's own claims for and evaluation of his own Genius and Knowledge. Crawford points out that while at Harvard Eliot's studies involved him in reading works in French, Pali, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Italian . As well as reading Spinoza's ethics in 'elegant seventeenth century Latin'.

Crawford belongs to the school of biographers that tries to find sources and origins for all aspects of the poems. The Waste Land almost becomes an organising principle for the book. Sometimes this is unintentional funny, as when someone's use of 'April' is noted. It feels as though no one ever said or read anything that Eliot didn't in some way use, which is probably not the desired effect.

Does it matter who the women in the Waste Land are modelled on? In what way does it improve your pleasure in reading the poem to know 'Tom' might have had an affair with a woman x or possibly Y? (not identified in Young Eliot but named in Part two). Crawford insistently reads The Waste Land in terms of Eliot's sexual problems and despair, but he avoids shutting the poem down completely in the way Lyndal Gordon did in her biography when she wrote declaratively that Prufrock's 'overwhelming question' is 'What is the meaning of life'..

The danger with an honest biography is that it can make the subject unlikeable. There's a fair amount of 'Poor Tom' in this book. He whines a lot to relatives and friends. He had to work hard. He had an unhappy marriage. He's not well. I'm sure many people in the 1920s would have been willing to take on a job for 600 a year and not complain about being strapped for cash or unable to take yet another holiday in Paris. He may have written some of the great poetry of the twentieth century but he comes across as a trans Atlantic Eyore with literary ambitions.

The other strength of this biography's amassing of detail is that familiar statements are put back into their historical context. Eliot's letters home describing how he was becoming the leading Critic and Poet in London, which I've seen quoted before, are set against the reality that few people were reading his poetry and he hadn't written much by way of criticism when he was writing those letters. He was as ambitious as he was talented.

Although the two volumes together must be close to a thousand pages, taken as a whole this is probably going to be the definitive biography of Eliot for the foreseeable future.

[Jonathon Crump · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty hard to get through. The last biography I read was King: a Life and Jonathan Eig literally wrote the new standard King biography with that. That biography was so vivid and descriptive. This one was not. Crawford is a man who is interested in letters over life. He’s more interested in what Eliot was reading than what he was doing. He’s more interested in how a life event factored into Eliot’s writing rather than being interested in that life event for its own sake. For example, Eliot spent many years working in a bank, and Crawford hardly explains how the bank looks. If I remember correctly, he describes a room where Eliot spent some time working? but I can’t picture the bank other than that one room. I could’ve also used more description of other global events as well just to situate myself in history. Again, Eig spends time describing the beginning of Elvis’s career in the King biography. And that helps a reader understand the time the subject of the biography more completely. The chapters in this also felt bloated and unfocused. The last chapter, for example, is called The Wasteland and Crawford talks a litttttle bit about the reception and prolonged publishing history of the seminal poem, and then he goes into several tangential things. He could’ve focused the chapters more of broken them up into smaller more digestible chunks.
But anyway, Crawford, if not the liveliest biographer, clearly read everything Eliot read. From French poets to classical philosophers, to Woolf and Pound, Crawford understood the insane amount of references Eliot ingested over his life. The dedication there is unreal. Crawford did also help me understand Eliot’s poetry and contribution more which is the main reason I read this book. There is a second half to this and I’m a glutton for punishment so I’ll probably read that one too💀

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would you believe if I told you that T. S. Eliot did not want his biography written?

Do you know that much of his most cherished correspondence, including any letters to his parents and virtually all of his correspondence with his first wife, was decimated at his own demand?

Having managed to make eternal poetry out of his most harsh embarrassments, Eliot coveted those mortifications to be afforded the grace of obliviousness. Consistent with a good deal of his denigration, which stressed poetic ‘impersonality’, his efforts to suppress his own biography were sometimes overwhelmingly fruitful.

Between the summer of 1905, when he was merely 16, and the winter of 1910, when he was 22, all that survives of his correspondence is a solitary postcard.

This is one motivation why the scarce biographers who have attempted to write his life tend to pass over the first 21 years in around 21 pages.

Into the following sixteen chapters has this book been divided:

1) Tom
2) Hi, Kid, Let’s Dance
3) Schoolings
4) A Full-Fledged Harvard Man
5) A Rose
6) Secret Knowledge
7) Voyages
8) A Philosopher and Actor Falls in Love
9) The Oxford Year
10) V. S. Eliot
11) Observations
12) American
13) Old Man
14) Professional
15) To Lausanne
16) The Waste Land

You know what this book does? This book aims to communicate a sense of the tentativeness, the shakiness of the young Eliot’s reputation. His work’s acceptance was no foregone conclusion. Repeatedly he felt he had dried up as a poet, and feared he had wasted his life.

Not marmoreal, but injured and sometimes hurtful, young T. S. Eliot may be impressively knowledgeable, but is also conflictedly human.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was prompted to read this first volume of Eliot's biography by several reviews of Crawford's recently-released Eliot After the Waste Land, which commemorates the 100th anniversary of The Waste Land's publishing. This takes me back to my undergraduate days, when I was first exposed to Eliot. Oh, how much I didn't know then.

[Monty Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. I was struck by the naivete of the young Eliot: he seems to have had no idea that the odious Bertrand Russell was cheating on him with his wife. There is so much about Eliot’s poetry that I love that I can forgive him his occasional absurdities and even overlook his ungracious anti Semitism. No one expresses melancholia and inchoate yearning so beautifully. Sometimes, I feel I am Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, the deep sea current picking my bones in whispers.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas

[Jacob Hiserman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crawford's entrancing style and immense research eloquently brings T.S. Eliot's tortured personal life to the forefront in this biography of the young poet through 1922. Heavy on the intimate details of Eliot's emotional and sexual struggles, but ordered towards a more experience-based and less intellectual account of the development of Eliot's genius. A must-read for all interested in Eliot and his poetry.

[Douglas Forman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crawford performs a much needed humanization of Eliot, who is too often seen as a cold intellectual. More than that, he mines Eliot's relationships, reading, and course work at Harvard with forensic intensity to show the source of many of Eliot's poetic achievements. This is intellectual biography at its finest.

[Thady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting insight into the early life of T. S. Eliot - tough read at times due to the level of detail - i hadn't realised Eliot was so young when he wrote Prufrock and The Waste Land - great read for fans of the poet and the times he lived in

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm interested in everything T.S. Eliot and enjoyed reading more about his interesting life. It covers his fascinating relationship with Bertrand Russel and others. Get's into quite a bit of theory and philosophy that can be tiring at times.

[Celia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book very much even though I did not know much about his or poetry. Robert Crawford was able to draw a dynamic picture of T.S. Eliot even though Eliot destroyed alot of material from his early years.

[Luke Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a wicked biography, extremely well put together

[JoJo · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was OK, but I didn't inspire me to read more about the man or his works which is what I would hope a biography would do.

[Gerald Greene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exhaustive biography by someone who has encyclopedic knowledge of the subject.

[James Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

For most of my life I’ve not been much of a poetry reader but I’ve been working on it more and more since retirement. The Wasteland in particular has been utterly beyond me but this first volume of a two volume biography did much to make it clearer to me while telling me a well written story of how it came to be. Frankly it is as much criticism as it is biography and I am very glad I read it.