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Eliot #2
Eliot After "The Waste Land"
Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" was hailed as “exceptional” and “assiduous” ( The New York Times ). Robert Crawford’s meticulous, incisive scholarship continues in Eliot After "The Waste Land" , an invaluable record of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man.
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, as well as on Eliot’s own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot . Eliot After “The Waste Land” , the long-awaited second volume of Crawford’s magisterial, meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most significant poet, 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 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.
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, as well as on Eliot’s own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot . Eliot After “The Waste Land” , the long-awaited second volume of Crawford’s magisterial, meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most significant poet, 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 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.
624 pages, Hardcover
First published August 23, 2022
About the author
Robert Crawford
189 books18 followersRobert Crawford FRSE FBA (b. 1959) is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 7, 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 the Brylcreemed, pin-striped and bowler-hatted trying-so-very-hard-to-be-an-English-gent photographs and the humourlessly ardent Anglicism.
And then there’s the disastrous marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood that after his death has led to Eliot being cast as hate figure of the literary patriarchy -- and immortalised in Michael Hastings’ rather one-sided play Tom and Viv, as well as the subsequent cinema adaptation.
But there’s obviously a lot more to Eliot than that and Crawford has very been very successful in redressing that balance.
Not that this is any sense a hatchet job of Vivien or a hagiography of Eliot. Crawford has been assiduously, even forensically, fair in his treatment of, I think, all the major players in this story and has been just as critical of both Eliot and Haigh-Wood as is demanded. Certainly, Vivien no longer emerges the cartoonish feminist martyr she has sometimes been portrayed and Eliot is no longer the heartless Prufrockian figure he often appears but Crawford certainly doesn’t shy away from engaging with Eliot’s anti-Semitism and his occasional sexism and nor does he try to wave it away as the ‘product of a different age’. Rather, we’re presented with two very complex, and actually pretty damaged, individuals who should really never have been married to each other in the first place.
Similarly, Crawford manages to get past Eliot’s monolithic Great Man of Letters reputation and present a vivid and often rather ordinary life that just happened to be punctuated by moments of great import for 20th century letters.
Something that was surprising was, in fact, this focus on Eliot the man rather than Eliot the poet. Given Crawford’s own career as a literary academic, not to mention a poet of some note, I would have expected, and probably liked, a little more critical analysis of Eliot’s work.
But on reflection, I think Crawford has made the right decision in focusing on the more human aspects of Eliot’s life (there is, after all, no shortage of critical study on Eliot.
What we do have is an evocative portrayal not just of a life but of a period in history and Crawford provides us with a highly readable account and analysis of a man who lived not only a rather dull, sedentary and emotionally stunted life compared to some of his contemporaries but who also produced some of the most important, and influential, poetry and criticism of the 20th century. I came away from reading this with some serious misconceptions around Eliot blown away and while I’m not sure I could say I like him as a human being any better, I’ve been given a greater sense of his life and psychology in its entirety and that is surely the mark of a great biography.
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 the Brylcreemed, pin-striped and bowler-hatted trying-so-very-hard-to-be-an-English-gent photographs and the humourlessly ardent Anglicism.
And then there’s the disastrous marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood that after his death has led to Eliot being cast as hate figure of the literary patriarchy -- and immortalised in Michael Hastings’ rather one-sided play Tom and Viv, as well as the subsequent cinema adaptation.
But there’s obviously a lot more to Eliot than that and Crawford has very been very successful in redressing that balance.
Not that this is any sense a hatchet job of Vivien or a hagiography of Eliot. Crawford has been assiduously, even forensically, fair in his treatment of, I think, all the major players in this story and has been just as critical of both Eliot and Haigh-Wood as is demanded. Certainly, Vivien no longer emerges the cartoonish feminist martyr she has sometimes been portrayed and Eliot is no longer the heartless Prufrockian figure he often appears but Crawford certainly doesn’t shy away from engaging with Eliot’s anti-Semitism and his occasional sexism and nor does he try to wave it away as the ‘product of a different age’. Rather, we’re presented with two very complex, and actually pretty damaged, individuals who should really never have been married to each other in the first place.
Similarly, Crawford manages to get past Eliot’s monolithic Great Man of Letters reputation and present a vivid and often rather ordinary life that just happened to be punctuated by moments of great import for 20th century letters.
Something that was surprising was, in fact, this focus on Eliot the man rather than Eliot the poet. Given Crawford’s own career as a literary academic, not to mention a poet of some note, I would have expected, and probably liked, a little more critical analysis of Eliot’s work.
But on reflection, I think Crawford has made the right decision in focusing on the more human aspects of Eliot’s life (there is, after all, no shortage of critical study on Eliot.
What we do have is an evocative portrayal not just of a life but of a period in history and Crawford provides us with a highly readable account and analysis of a man who lived not only a rather dull, sedentary and emotionally stunted life compared to some of his contemporaries but who also produced some of the most important, and influential, poetry and criticism of the 20th century. I came away from reading this with some serious misconceptions around Eliot blown away and while I’m not sure I could say I like him as a human being any better, I’ve been given a greater sense of his life and psychology in its entirety and that is surely the mark of a great biography.
May 6, 2022
“The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot is one of my favourite poems, although anyone who has read it will know that the epithet “poem” barely does it justice. Eliot stands virtually alone in the pantheon of British poetry, creating verse that challenged the conformity and traditions of the time.
I am a devotee of T. S. Eliot and I prepared for this book by reading Robert Crawford’s equally excellent first volume, 2015’s “Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land”, in which he charted Eliot’s childhood and education, examining the eclectic (and often esoteric) influences on his burgeoning poetry that led to his epic poem. This second volume, entitled “Eliot After the Wasteland”, takes up Eliot’s life after the publication of that tumultuous, iconoclastic work; a period when he would write some of his most celebrated works, including “Four Quartets” and “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” and several successful plays.
As author Robert Crawford states in the introduction to this second volume of his biography, he proffers a deep dive into the life of T. S. Eliot; not only of the celebrated poet but also to the secret life of “Tom” as his friends and family knew him. Throughout, Crawford refers to Eliot as Tom. With unprecedented access to surviving letters and interviews with people who knew Eliot at the time (indeed, Crawford is the last biographer to interview anyone who knew Eliot when “The Waste Land” was first published). This is very much a book about T. S. Eliot the man. Crawford paints an unvarnished portrait of Eliot, brilliant but human. He does not ignore Eliot’s failings in favour of a hagiography; Tom’s bawdy racist poetry and almost casual anti-Semitism will no doubt shock the modern reader.
It is easy to dive back into Crawford’s work and continue Eliot’s life story, who now feels almost like an old friend thanks to the detail with which the first book brought him to life. The distinguished gentleman gracing the cover is T. S. Eliot as we know him; a world away from the nervous-looking youth from the first volume.
This volume picks up the Eliot’s story from the end of the previous volume with little preamble, so while there is no absolutely pressing need to read that book first, some readers may feel like they should. This is merely an observation, not a criticism: having read the first volume, I can put myself in the shoes of someone picking up this book fresh. And as the second volume of this work, it is to be expected. Crawford offers intelligent analysis of Eliot’s poetry throughout but confesses that this isn’t the main thrust of his biography.
There are many developments in Tom’s life in this book - his continued yet hidden feelings for another woman, Emily Hale; the protracted breakdown of his marriage; the subsequent death of his wife, Vivien; his life-changing involvement with the fledgling publishing company Faber & Gwyer (soon to become Faber & Faber, which publishes his first book of poems), his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and full British citizenship. Indeed, religion is one of the main driving forces of Eliot’s life; so too is his surprisingly complicated love-life. But above all, the main constant and unwelcome companion of Eliot’s life was Vivien’s and his own ill-health. Sadly, in the latter part of his life this would continue, especially for Vivien. There are unflinching passages about her suffering, and also of Tom’s - one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at how often Tom gets struck down by influenza or some such ailment. He agonises over guilt that he may have in some way caused Vivien’s illness, even metaphorically “killing” her.
Obviously, the Second World War looms large in this period of Eliot’s life, and we feel the national tension grow as conflict and even invasion becomes ever more likely. There is a lot of interesting detail about Eliot’s experiences as an ARP warden and it is fascinating to read how the war developed on an almost weekly basis through the prism of his life. By the end of the book, Eliot has become a major celebrity, warranting front page splashes in the Daily Mail when he married his much younger secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and finally finding happiness (and not a little eroticism).
“Eliot After the Wasteland” is a remarkable achievement and I enjoyed it immensely, and will return to both it and its predecessor. However, there are a couple of factors that make this book an often difficult read. Firstly, Crawford frequently mentions that various organisations, collections of writing, even the recipients of books from Tom, contained few or no women. This may warrant a single mention, but continually drawing attention to it as some kind of grievous sin almost a century later is egregious, and can only be due to the author wishing to score a few Brownie points with a progressive modern readership.
Secondly, like its predecessor, this book is a weighty tome that includes a lot of painstaking detail on every aspect of Eliot’s life, both literary and personal, (in the case of Vivien’s illnesses, rather embarrassingly so) and as such the text can be a little longwinded at times: expect to read about every illness, night out and holiday the poet ever had.
Criticisms aside, T. S. Eliot was a very intelligent and complex person, often self-absorbed, and his life-story requires a book of this calibre. Despite many highbrow passages, the book is very readable and there are moments of great poignancy - this is biography done right. “Eliot After the Wasteland” is a superb continuation of a groundbreaking biography of T. S. Eliot that is as close to definitive as we are ever likely to get.
I am a devotee of T. S. Eliot and I prepared for this book by reading Robert Crawford’s equally excellent first volume, 2015’s “Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land”, in which he charted Eliot’s childhood and education, examining the eclectic (and often esoteric) influences on his burgeoning poetry that led to his epic poem. This second volume, entitled “Eliot After the Wasteland”, takes up Eliot’s life after the publication of that tumultuous, iconoclastic work; a period when he would write some of his most celebrated works, including “Four Quartets” and “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” and several successful plays.
As author Robert Crawford states in the introduction to this second volume of his biography, he proffers a deep dive into the life of T. S. Eliot; not only of the celebrated poet but also to the secret life of “Tom” as his friends and family knew him. Throughout, Crawford refers to Eliot as Tom. With unprecedented access to surviving letters and interviews with people who knew Eliot at the time (indeed, Crawford is the last biographer to interview anyone who knew Eliot when “The Waste Land” was first published). This is very much a book about T. S. Eliot the man. Crawford paints an unvarnished portrait of Eliot, brilliant but human. He does not ignore Eliot’s failings in favour of a hagiography; Tom’s bawdy racist poetry and almost casual anti-Semitism will no doubt shock the modern reader.
It is easy to dive back into Crawford’s work and continue Eliot’s life story, who now feels almost like an old friend thanks to the detail with which the first book brought him to life. The distinguished gentleman gracing the cover is T. S. Eliot as we know him; a world away from the nervous-looking youth from the first volume.
This volume picks up the Eliot’s story from the end of the previous volume with little preamble, so while there is no absolutely pressing need to read that book first, some readers may feel like they should. This is merely an observation, not a criticism: having read the first volume, I can put myself in the shoes of someone picking up this book fresh. And as the second volume of this work, it is to be expected. Crawford offers intelligent analysis of Eliot’s poetry throughout but confesses that this isn’t the main thrust of his biography.
There are many developments in Tom’s life in this book - his continued yet hidden feelings for another woman, Emily Hale; the protracted breakdown of his marriage; the subsequent death of his wife, Vivien; his life-changing involvement with the fledgling publishing company Faber & Gwyer (soon to become Faber & Faber, which publishes his first book of poems), his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and full British citizenship. Indeed, religion is one of the main driving forces of Eliot’s life; so too is his surprisingly complicated love-life. But above all, the main constant and unwelcome companion of Eliot’s life was Vivien’s and his own ill-health. Sadly, in the latter part of his life this would continue, especially for Vivien. There are unflinching passages about her suffering, and also of Tom’s - one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at how often Tom gets struck down by influenza or some such ailment. He agonises over guilt that he may have in some way caused Vivien’s illness, even metaphorically “killing” her.
Obviously, the Second World War looms large in this period of Eliot’s life, and we feel the national tension grow as conflict and even invasion becomes ever more likely. There is a lot of interesting detail about Eliot’s experiences as an ARP warden and it is fascinating to read how the war developed on an almost weekly basis through the prism of his life. By the end of the book, Eliot has become a major celebrity, warranting front page splashes in the Daily Mail when he married his much younger secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and finally finding happiness (and not a little eroticism).
“Eliot After the Wasteland” is a remarkable achievement and I enjoyed it immensely, and will return to both it and its predecessor. However, there are a couple of factors that make this book an often difficult read. Firstly, Crawford frequently mentions that various organisations, collections of writing, even the recipients of books from Tom, contained few or no women. This may warrant a single mention, but continually drawing attention to it as some kind of grievous sin almost a century later is egregious, and can only be due to the author wishing to score a few Brownie points with a progressive modern readership.
Secondly, like its predecessor, this book is a weighty tome that includes a lot of painstaking detail on every aspect of Eliot’s life, both literary and personal, (in the case of Vivien’s illnesses, rather embarrassingly so) and as such the text can be a little longwinded at times: expect to read about every illness, night out and holiday the poet ever had.
Criticisms aside, T. S. Eliot was a very intelligent and complex person, often self-absorbed, and his life-story requires a book of this calibre. Despite many highbrow passages, the book is very readable and there are moments of great poignancy - this is biography done right. “Eliot After the Wasteland” is a superb continuation of a groundbreaking biography of T. S. Eliot that is as close to definitive as we are ever likely to get.
August 5, 2025
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 be particularly extraordinary, and Eliot's life is, frankly, rather quotidian. More accurately, Eliot described his own life as like something out of a bad Russian novel and there is something here about a condensed Anna Karenina without the train mishap at the end. The bulk of the second volume of Crawford's biography does, inevitably, deal with the train crash of Eliot's marriage and his other relationships before the very unexpected plot twist at the end when instead of slipping into a life of loneliness and despair, he falls in love (and really falls in love) with his secretary of 38 years younger.
The emphasis on Eliot's relationships is made all the more necessary by the fact that his poetry dries up some twenty years before his death. In terms of poetry, Eliot after the Waste Land really is Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets. There is of course a lot of literary and cultural criticism as well as plays which, whilst successful at the time, have not aged well. The final chapter really is nothing more than a list of social engagements undertaken by Tom and Valerie and some rather touching anecdotes.
All this could make for a tedious biography (and I do think that one volume of perhaps 600 pages could have sufficed rather than two of 900) but Crawford is a very good writer and story teller. This will undoubtedly be the definitive biography for some time to come, helped immensely by the release of Emily Hale's letters in 2020. I presume that it was waiting for this hoard to be revealed that caused the six year wait between the two volumes.
Eliot is presented as an essentially kind and sensitive man with significant blind spots in respect of his own emotional make-up and the impact of his words. His continued denial that he was in any way anti-semitic runs up against writing that is, simply put, anti-semitic. To claim that denigrating men with Jewish names, or particular "types" of Jews is only attacking the particular, not the general, doesn't hold water. There are, it seems, no counter examples of Eliot praising Jewish people - individuals or in general. His loyal defence of Ezra Pound was also made at the cost of not distancing himself sufficiency from Pound's, possibly insane, fascist-sympathising views.
It is also difficult to read Eliot's biography without feeling great sympathy for Emily Hale who, we might say, was led on by Eliot for decades before declaring after Vivian's death that he could never marry and then in the flash of an eye marrying his secretary. Too late Eliot realised that he had spent his life in love with the image of Emily as she was in 1916.
Eliot's adult life has something of a Divine Comedy about it, which Dante-lover as he was, he may have reflected upon. The inferno of the Waste Land and his years of marriage to Vivian are then followed by the Purgatory of Ash Wednesday and the years of renunciation after Vivian's death before the unexpected Paradisio of his final few years with Valerie. It was the Inferno and Purgatory years that produced the great poetry, but you can't help thinking that from Eliot's point of view the right marriage at an earlier age may have been a good trade off for the poetic inspiration. But then again, perhaps not.
The emphasis on Eliot's relationships is made all the more necessary by the fact that his poetry dries up some twenty years before his death. In terms of poetry, Eliot after the Waste Land really is Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets. There is of course a lot of literary and cultural criticism as well as plays which, whilst successful at the time, have not aged well. The final chapter really is nothing more than a list of social engagements undertaken by Tom and Valerie and some rather touching anecdotes.
All this could make for a tedious biography (and I do think that one volume of perhaps 600 pages could have sufficed rather than two of 900) but Crawford is a very good writer and story teller. This will undoubtedly be the definitive biography for some time to come, helped immensely by the release of Emily Hale's letters in 2020. I presume that it was waiting for this hoard to be revealed that caused the six year wait between the two volumes.
Eliot is presented as an essentially kind and sensitive man with significant blind spots in respect of his own emotional make-up and the impact of his words. His continued denial that he was in any way anti-semitic runs up against writing that is, simply put, anti-semitic. To claim that denigrating men with Jewish names, or particular "types" of Jews is only attacking the particular, not the general, doesn't hold water. There are, it seems, no counter examples of Eliot praising Jewish people - individuals or in general. His loyal defence of Ezra Pound was also made at the cost of not distancing himself sufficiency from Pound's, possibly insane, fascist-sympathising views.
It is also difficult to read Eliot's biography without feeling great sympathy for Emily Hale who, we might say, was led on by Eliot for decades before declaring after Vivian's death that he could never marry and then in the flash of an eye marrying his secretary. Too late Eliot realised that he had spent his life in love with the image of Emily as she was in 1916.
Eliot's adult life has something of a Divine Comedy about it, which Dante-lover as he was, he may have reflected upon. The inferno of the Waste Land and his years of marriage to Vivian are then followed by the Purgatory of Ash Wednesday and the years of renunciation after Vivian's death before the unexpected Paradisio of his final few years with Valerie. It was the Inferno and Purgatory years that produced the great poetry, but you can't help thinking that from Eliot's point of view the right marriage at an earlier age may have been a good trade off for the poetic inspiration. But then again, perhaps not.
wishlist-b
January 28, 2023***********************
*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
*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
April 13, 2026
My favorite two-part biography of T. S. Eliot.
Read
July 3, 2022Annoyingly goodreads doesn't have the sexy cover Jonathan Cape is using (so much as one can say of a depiction of elderly Eliot) but I shall go on.
I've said before I think Crawford's prose style is perfect for his target here. It's a kind of 'breakneck detail' which suits the life of Tom Eliot wonderfully - it's a life of torrential intricacy but appears downright staid & sedentary on the macrolevel.
I struggle to do this one justice - it's brilliant and if you read Young Eliot then here we have bigger & better. I could gush I'll just say Crawford does a phenomenal job of drawing the story out through the literally hundreds of people Tom encountered I imagine it's a kind of Everest assorting & collecting this many letters of the period
And with the new Emily Hale letters? Crawford surprisingly doesn't linger as one would expect the temptation is. They do strike me as a funny kind of revelation - - declassified after 70 years - famous poet DIDnt have sex - anyway. Love you tom thank you rob
I've said before I think Crawford's prose style is perfect for his target here. It's a kind of 'breakneck detail' which suits the life of Tom Eliot wonderfully - it's a life of torrential intricacy but appears downright staid & sedentary on the macrolevel.
I struggle to do this one justice - it's brilliant and if you read Young Eliot then here we have bigger & better. I could gush I'll just say Crawford does a phenomenal job of drawing the story out through the literally hundreds of people Tom encountered I imagine it's a kind of Everest assorting & collecting this many letters of the period
And with the new Emily Hale letters? Crawford surprisingly doesn't linger as one would expect the temptation is. They do strike me as a funny kind of revelation - - declassified after 70 years - famous poet DIDnt have sex - anyway. Love you tom thank you rob
September 19, 2022
My attention waned in the early part of this second volume (perhaps due to a quite detailed discussion of Eliot's increasing focus on religiosity and celibacy.) However, I found that the examination of the poet's later works and his recently-unsealed correspondence returned me to the same level of interest I had with the first volume in this biography, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land. Both are must reads for the Eliot-curious.
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 ones. To the world T. S. Eliot was a master poet, a Nobel winner who carried himself with both poise and well the trappings of of a poet. Tom as the author refers to him and how friends of Eliot addressed him was far different, full of doubts, guilt, loves and a sense of humor that does not seem part of a person who wrote The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men. Robert Crawford has captured the man in full, along with all those who touched or were touched by the great man in this second book of biography, Eliot After The Waste Land.
The book begins where the first book left off, as Eliot is getting The Waste Land, his poem on loss, desire and culture, is slowly gaining notice, and his activities as such have increased. Not wanting to give up a steady income, Eliot continues to work in Lloyd's bank in a job that was both demanding of his brain and his time. Allowed only one hour for lunch and late hours that made him work till well after midnight on both his works and editing his magazine and dealing with the health of his wife. From here the momentum builds, a possible affair, one he felt bad about, more works and recognition, a Nobel prize. Through it all Crawford does not loose the man, who was far more humorous and not as dour as one would think of a poet. One of his works was the basis for the long-running play Cats, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
The book is well- written and well- researched with thousands of interesting facts an revelations. Eliot could be unpleasant, and racist which Crawford does not cover for. Nor does he blame others as many biographers do for the action of their subject. Eliot's wife is treated more than fairly. The letters between Eliot and Emily Hale, Eliot's first love and biggest crush are discussed and not in a gossipy way but revel more about Eliot and well his guilt and feelings and how this might have effected his work. There are discussions of the poems, plays and his other writings, much of which I found fascinating.
This is not a book that a person would pick up on a lark, more a book for scholars or fans of the poet. Which is a shame. The writing is very good, the story it tells never loses its way, and even more the reader never stops caring about Eliot's like, even when success and financial security are assured, there is still more to learn, still more to wonder at and still more to be astonished by creatively, by both Eliot and Crawford. I would suggest starting with the first book, just to get a measure of the man, but readers should have no problems in following on. Crawford is that good a writer.
Everyone has two faces, one they present to the world and one that is kept for friends, family, those considered family and loved ones. To the world T. S. Eliot was a master poet, a Nobel winner who carried himself with both poise and well the trappings of of a poet. Tom as the author refers to him and how friends of Eliot addressed him was far different, full of doubts, guilt, loves and a sense of humor that does not seem part of a person who wrote The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men. Robert Crawford has captured the man in full, along with all those who touched or were touched by the great man in this second book of biography, Eliot After The Waste Land.
The book begins where the first book left off, as Eliot is getting The Waste Land, his poem on loss, desire and culture, is slowly gaining notice, and his activities as such have increased. Not wanting to give up a steady income, Eliot continues to work in Lloyd's bank in a job that was both demanding of his brain and his time. Allowed only one hour for lunch and late hours that made him work till well after midnight on both his works and editing his magazine and dealing with the health of his wife. From here the momentum builds, a possible affair, one he felt bad about, more works and recognition, a Nobel prize. Through it all Crawford does not loose the man, who was far more humorous and not as dour as one would think of a poet. One of his works was the basis for the long-running play Cats, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
The book is well- written and well- researched with thousands of interesting facts an revelations. Eliot could be unpleasant, and racist which Crawford does not cover for. Nor does he blame others as many biographers do for the action of their subject. Eliot's wife is treated more than fairly. The letters between Eliot and Emily Hale, Eliot's first love and biggest crush are discussed and not in a gossipy way but revel more about Eliot and well his guilt and feelings and how this might have effected his work. There are discussions of the poems, plays and his other writings, much of which I found fascinating.
This is not a book that a person would pick up on a lark, more a book for scholars or fans of the poet. Which is a shame. The writing is very good, the story it tells never loses its way, and even more the reader never stops caring about Eliot's like, even when success and financial security are assured, there is still more to learn, still more to wonder at and still more to be astonished by creatively, by both Eliot and Crawford. I would suggest starting with the first book, just to get a measure of the man, but readers should have no problems in following on. Crawford is that good a writer.
January 22, 2023
This is the second volume (following on Young Eliot) of Robert Crawford’s highly detailed biography of T.S. Eliot, covering all aspects of Eliot’s life as poet, critic, playwright, public personality, and private man. This is the first biography to draw on Eliot’s letters, unsealed in 2020, to Emily Hale, an American woman whom he knew in his youth and who would later, in the 1920s–1930s, become for Eliot an ideal woman whom he loved from afar but felt unable to marry.
As the biography opens, Eliot has just published the poem that made his name. For most of the rest of the 1920s, Crawford depicts his life as centered around two personal dramas: his nightmarish marriage to his mentally ill wife Vivien, and his dawning Christian faith that would see him enter the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England and assume a very different stance as literary and social critic than other English Modernists. The 1930s sees him taking his first forays into dramatic writing, and a visit by Emily Hale to England inspires the secret subtext of the poem “Burnt Norton”. As World War II erupts and Britain faces German bombing, the biographer is able to precisely date the composition of the following three poems in Four Quartets. After this, Eliot is a spent force poetically, but his reputation only grew and led to innumerable invitations to lecture or receive honorary degrees for the remainder of his life. And just as he felt a burnt-out husk, unable to contemplate marrying again, he is won over by his secretary Valerie Fletcher and spends his last several years in domestic bliss.
All these decades are recounted in great detail. Unlike earlier biographers, Crawford was able to draw on – besides the unsealed Emily Hale correspondence – the many published volumes of Eliot’s letters that document, for example, his everyday work as publishing executive at Faber & Faber. We get even testimonies of Eliot from the most unexpected sources, like a woman’s brief anecdote about meeting him as a child in her description to some goods for auction. Some readers may complain that this is too much detail, but I felt that these two volumes amount to the best all-around biography of T.S. Eliot.
Unlike some earlier biographers who sought in their books to focus on particular flaws, like Eliot’s anti-semitism or his treatment of Vivienne, Crawford aimed at a full picture of the man. He certainly confronts Eliot’s anti-semitism, but shows how Eliot both exhibited a life-long prejudice subconsciously inherited from his particular upbringing, while being consciously unable to see the problem. The decline of his first marriage is told more sympathetically, as now plenty of scholarship exists to show the degree of her mental illness.
As the biography opens, Eliot has just published the poem that made his name. For most of the rest of the 1920s, Crawford depicts his life as centered around two personal dramas: his nightmarish marriage to his mentally ill wife Vivien, and his dawning Christian faith that would see him enter the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England and assume a very different stance as literary and social critic than other English Modernists. The 1930s sees him taking his first forays into dramatic writing, and a visit by Emily Hale to England inspires the secret subtext of the poem “Burnt Norton”. As World War II erupts and Britain faces German bombing, the biographer is able to precisely date the composition of the following three poems in Four Quartets. After this, Eliot is a spent force poetically, but his reputation only grew and led to innumerable invitations to lecture or receive honorary degrees for the remainder of his life. And just as he felt a burnt-out husk, unable to contemplate marrying again, he is won over by his secretary Valerie Fletcher and spends his last several years in domestic bliss.
All these decades are recounted in great detail. Unlike earlier biographers, Crawford was able to draw on – besides the unsealed Emily Hale correspondence – the many published volumes of Eliot’s letters that document, for example, his everyday work as publishing executive at Faber & Faber. We get even testimonies of Eliot from the most unexpected sources, like a woman’s brief anecdote about meeting him as a child in her description to some goods for auction. Some readers may complain that this is too much detail, but I felt that these two volumes amount to the best all-around biography of T.S. Eliot.
Unlike some earlier biographers who sought in their books to focus on particular flaws, like Eliot’s anti-semitism or his treatment of Vivienne, Crawford aimed at a full picture of the man. He certainly confronts Eliot’s anti-semitism, but shows how Eliot both exhibited a life-long prejudice subconsciously inherited from his particular upbringing, while being consciously unable to see the problem. The decline of his first marriage is told more sympathetically, as now plenty of scholarship exists to show the degree of her mental illness.
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 the impression of being carved into granite blocks and handed down to awe-stricken lesser intellects. On the other hand, Crawford quotes from a letter that:
poet Basil Bunting spotted Tom ‘at a party wearing an enormous cape lined with red and eyebrows painted green’. ‘”Thought the party need hotting up”,’ Tom remarked.
That is an image of TSE that not many of us will have pictured before.
Eliot may have appeared dry but this book shows his human side. He drank too much sometimes; he smoked too much all the time; he hurt people who cared for him and who thought their affection was reciprocated; he let off steam by writing obscene limericks.
It also shows the genesis of Four Quartets and how Eliot distilled personal experience and belief to write such great poems.
Crawford’s research has been phenomenal and I cannot imagine anyone ever taking that much trouble to write a further biography of TSE. Crawford has benefitted from the unsealing of Emily Hale’s archive of TSE’s letters at Princeton, fifty years after her death – and shows us that she was THE most important person in his life from 1923 – 1947 or so. However, she wasn’t as important to Tom as his religion. Eliot told Emily he cannot marry her because he will not divorce Vivien. Thus, when Vivian suddenly dies, Emily could reasonably expect that he would then marry her. However, Eliot decided that he could not face marriage again. Yet, a few years later, he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. That was obviously a full marriage, as we can see from some erotic writing.
The book really helps us to understand T.S. Eliot and thus to have a far greater appreciation of his poetry. If you have any interest in Eliot or his poetry, I cannot recommend it highly enough, I really can’t. As Crawford writes, “To different people he presented different selves” and we are greatly in Crawford’s debt for showing us all those different Eliots.
#EliotAfterTheWasteLand #NetGalley
poet Basil Bunting spotted Tom ‘at a party wearing an enormous cape lined with red and eyebrows painted green’. ‘”Thought the party need hotting up”,’ Tom remarked.
That is an image of TSE that not many of us will have pictured before.
Eliot may have appeared dry but this book shows his human side. He drank too much sometimes; he smoked too much all the time; he hurt people who cared for him and who thought their affection was reciprocated; he let off steam by writing obscene limericks.
It also shows the genesis of Four Quartets and how Eliot distilled personal experience and belief to write such great poems.
Crawford’s research has been phenomenal and I cannot imagine anyone ever taking that much trouble to write a further biography of TSE. Crawford has benefitted from the unsealing of Emily Hale’s archive of TSE’s letters at Princeton, fifty years after her death – and shows us that she was THE most important person in his life from 1923 – 1947 or so. However, she wasn’t as important to Tom as his religion. Eliot told Emily he cannot marry her because he will not divorce Vivien. Thus, when Vivian suddenly dies, Emily could reasonably expect that he would then marry her. However, Eliot decided that he could not face marriage again. Yet, a few years later, he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. That was obviously a full marriage, as we can see from some erotic writing.
The book really helps us to understand T.S. Eliot and thus to have a far greater appreciation of his poetry. If you have any interest in Eliot or his poetry, I cannot recommend it highly enough, I really can’t. As Crawford writes, “To different people he presented different selves” and we are greatly in Crawford’s debt for showing us all those different Eliots.
#EliotAfterTheWasteLand #NetGalley
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 exhausting.
At first i thought it wasn't going to work, but as the details accumulate so does the character of T.S. Eliot. Crawford gives Eliot's detractors space as well and doesn't flinch from the by now well known accusations. That Eliot was a product of his time and class and family, and that those attitudes have not dated well, is hardly surprising.
At times I wished he'd slow down. How did Eliot reconcile his Christianity, which allowed him to tell Emily Hale he couldn't possibly get a divorce because the attendant publicity would damage the reputation of the Church (!), with publishing Graves' White Goddess?
From time to time the eye snags on a detail. 'Louis MacNeice, who had struggled with alcohol, and was almost twenty years Tom's junior, died on 3 September'. Since alcohol played no part in his death, it's a strange way of presenting the information. It makes me wonder how much else is equally dubious.
Biography rarely illuminates the poems. Trying to decide who the various women in the Wasteland are based on seems like a futile indulgence in gossip, which adds nothing to the experience of reading the poem and only tends to shut it down. Whether you agree with Crawford that Four Quartets deserves the space it gets is up to you.
This must be the fourth biography I've read of Eliot. I think it's the least partisan. In that avalanche of detail the figure of a life appears. Unlike Moody's hagiography of Pound, Crawford portrays a complicated man with all his flaws and foibles. The Eliot industry will no doubt produce another biography at some stage, but it's difficult to imagine how it could replace this one.
At first i thought it wasn't going to work, but as the details accumulate so does the character of T.S. Eliot. Crawford gives Eliot's detractors space as well and doesn't flinch from the by now well known accusations. That Eliot was a product of his time and class and family, and that those attitudes have not dated well, is hardly surprising.
At times I wished he'd slow down. How did Eliot reconcile his Christianity, which allowed him to tell Emily Hale he couldn't possibly get a divorce because the attendant publicity would damage the reputation of the Church (!), with publishing Graves' White Goddess?
From time to time the eye snags on a detail. 'Louis MacNeice, who had struggled with alcohol, and was almost twenty years Tom's junior, died on 3 September'. Since alcohol played no part in his death, it's a strange way of presenting the information. It makes me wonder how much else is equally dubious.
Biography rarely illuminates the poems. Trying to decide who the various women in the Wasteland are based on seems like a futile indulgence in gossip, which adds nothing to the experience of reading the poem and only tends to shut it down. Whether you agree with Crawford that Four Quartets deserves the space it gets is up to you.
This must be the fourth biography I've read of Eliot. I think it's the least partisan. In that avalanche of detail the figure of a life appears. Unlike Moody's hagiography of Pound, Crawford portrays a complicated man with all his flaws and foibles. The Eliot industry will no doubt produce another biography at some stage, but it's difficult to imagine how it could replace this one.
September 4, 2022
An excellent book, the second in a two-part account of the poet's life. But disconcerting: Eliot was wonderful poet whose work has stayed with me almost word-for-word since I studied him at school and university. But it's plain from this account that he'd not be the man with whom you'd want to go for a few beers. He had a disastrous first marriage to Vivienne; her mental health was poor but it's easy to read between the lines that he wasn't a steadying influence. After her separation, hospitalisation and eventual sad death he turned in on himself in a way that was self-absorbed and over-subtle while, at the same time, wining and dining with the great and good and keeping up intimate, celibate, epistolatory friendships with more than one woman. At this stage in his life he comes across as a dreadful whinger and a right old bore, dancing on theological pinheads. He was racist and anti-semitic, while trying to argue that he wasn't. Happily, his walls were breached by Valerie, his second wife, more than thirty years his junior, and he had a few years of late, great happiness. His greatest poems are still very great, but his critical writings and my opinion of him as a man have been diminished.
June 25, 2023
a common problem in the biographies of widely successful artists is that the final years become simply a dull litany of success, in relating which the biographer is as palpably bored as any reader might become. eliot is this in exaggeration almost to the highest possible extent. he wrote nothing of much value in the last 20 years of his life after little gidding, and crawford hurries through them in a hundred pages, with the final years after the elder statesman in which he didnt write anything at all crammed into about 20 pages. but crawford does an admirable job all the way through, even if constantly dogged by having to discuss eliot's dull as dishwater social engagements, and is perhaps a little too even-handed towards the accusations of anti-semitism
August 7, 2024
This is such a good biography: even handed, interesting, sensitive, complete despite the voluminous letters and publications to research. Robert Crawford must be a remarkable person. This is not, like The Hyacinth Girl, a thinly-veiled attack on the subject by an author adept at all kinds of distortion and a mere creature of the preset moment. Crawford is the opposite: deft, skilled, learned, generous, and a seeker of proportion and clarity. Handling human greatness properly is not an easy thing. T.S. Eliot provides a cagey, complex subject for a biographer. He deserved and required an exceptional biographer, which I think he has obtained.
December 27, 2025
Crawford's two-volume biography of my favourite poet has furnished me with one of my most enjoyable reading experiences of the year. I loved this window into T.S. Eliot’s later life, craft, and inspirations, and I found myself rooting for his success as though he were the underdog protagonist of a Dickensian novel.
This biography is long and dense, so it's probably not for the casual reader, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wishes to learn more about this giant of modernist poetry.
I'm not usually a big fan of biography or memoir as a genre, but I already know I'll read this again at some point in the future.
This biography is long and dense, so it's probably not for the casual reader, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wishes to learn more about this giant of modernist poetry.
I'm not usually a big fan of biography or memoir as a genre, but I already know I'll read this again at some point in the future.
April 29, 2023
The 2nd volume of Robert Crawford’s monumental biography of T S Eliot. Comprehensive, detailed and meticulously researched, this will surely remain the definitive biography for some time to come. Excellent literary scholarship accompanies a generous, balanced and non-judgmental account of Eliot’s life and work. Insightful and perceptive, this is biography at its best. It’s a long book, for sure, and with its accumulation of detail takes some dedication to plough through, but it’s well worth the effort and I very much enjoyed reading it.
April 25, 2025
The portrayal of Crawford's book is of a man brilliant, complicated, reserved and faith-filled. The tragedy of his first wife would be enough to break the spirit of any man. Eliot's response is to rigidly follow what is proper for a committed believer in the sanctity of marriage as he did. One wonders what would have happened had he had a more close knit and intimate set of friendship as C.S. Lewis and Tolkien had for each other. May T.S. Eliot Rest in Peace.
November 16, 2022
Very much focused on the Emily Hale relationship, understandably as he wanted to beat others to the correspondence, but overall very worthwhile. TSE was such a miserable soul! Crawford tended to get a bit list-y at times, but on the whole the narrative is well-handled, and often quite moving.
October 5, 2022
His personal letters were unsealed in 2020 allowing for this very informative and inspiring book.
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