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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 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 that 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 Eliot 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 an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.
- Sales Rank: #717776 in Books
- Published on: 2016-04-05
- Released on: 2016-04-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.29" h x 1.38" w x 5.43" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
Review
“Assiduous . . . Crawford has done exceptional spadework in turning up clues that takes us deeper into Eliot's symbolic landscapes.” ―David Yezzi, The New York Times Book Review
“Impressive. . .Young Eliot marks both a milestone and a turning point. First, it coincides with the 50th anniversary of his death. . . Young Eliot is judicious, sympathetic [and] meticulous . . . it can hardly fail. The story it tells of a great poet's early life is enthralling.” ―Robert McCrum, The Guardian
“Even now, if you were to ask readers to name the 20th century's greatest poem, at least among those written in English, the answer would almost certainly be T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' (1922). . .Young Eliot tracks in enthralling, exhaustive detail the poet's life up to the book publication of 'The Waste Land' . . .Earlier biographies have somewhat scanted Eliot's American childhood and youth, which is one reason why this new book is so valuable. It is magisterial in its minutiae . . .While proffering a steady flurry of names, facts and occasional trivialities, Crawford nearly always relates his discoveries to the poetry . . . No possible connection to Eliot's published work, however faint or distant, goes unnoticed. But Crawford, who is a professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of St. Andrews, also interweaves several ongoing themes. . .As Crawford observes, Eliot's early work is replete with sexual yearning and uncertainty, his later poetry rife with sexual disgust. The marriage of 'Tom and Viv' proved a disaster, but it gave the world 'The Waste Land.'” ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“A rich exploration of Eliot's life, his grinding labors and excoriating intelligence.” ―Edna O'Brien, The New York Times Book Review
“This is the most complex and detailed portrait to date. Crawford's Eliot is a 'shy, sometimes naïve and vulnerable' young man whose poetry-particularly 'The Waste Land'-was shaped by the suffering of his early adult years. . . Sometime after 2020, when Eliot's letters to Emily Hale are released, Mr. Crawford plans to publish a second volume on Eliot from the publication of 'The Waste Land' to his death in 1965. If that volume is anything like Young Eliot in scope and storytelling, the two should form the definitive life of the poet for many years to come.” ―Micah Mattrix, The Wall Street Journal
“Robert Crawford's possibly unimprovable recent biography, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, maps Eliot's progress from a shy, intellectual undergraduate to a shy, intellectual poet possessed of a voice that would change the English language. Crawford has taken on an immense task: to tell the story of the poet's poetic development alongside the story of his life, and he succeeds pretty much entirely. The book is brilliantly perceptive on the interaction of the life and the work, and it charts with erudition and wit the development of Eliot's unique poetic sensibility-particularly the origins of 'Prufrock.'” ―Damian Lanigan, The New Republic
“It is, of course, the first biography of Eliot to be able to make extensive use of his personal papers . . . It is also grounded in the most thorough archival work in the US, and the picture painted is enormously detailed, without overwhelming the reader. . . A major achievement: this is very much what a literary biography should be . . . It is likely to be a while before the next volume, if it is to be on the same scale, but it will be worth the wait if it does what this first book does: to offer a credible and three-dimensional portrait of this most elusive figure.” ―Rowan Williams, The New Statesman
“Crawford's account lends something special to Eliot's poems - not just a refreshed sensory palette, but a personal presence, a bloodstream. Where so often we go to Eliot's poems for a glimpse at humanity, Crawford helps us find something human, a man who dares to '[d]isturb the universe.'” ―Michael Andor Brodeur, The Boston Globe
“Magnificent . . . Superbly written and researched, it contains much new material.” ―Ian Thomson, The Independent
“A new biography sheds light on a tricky, brilliant writer. Young Eliot is the most carefully researched life to date . . . Few writers offer such a richly complex subject matter. Even fewer biographies offer such a fair assessment of the man.” ―The Economist
“Robert Crawford's intelligent, thoroughly researched and well-written book lights the long fuse that led from T.S. Eliot's birth in St. Louis in 1888 to the aesthetic explosion of 'The Waste Land' in 1922 . . . Crawford is perceptive about how Eliot's extensive reading, especially Arthur Symons' 'The Symbolist Movement in Literature' (1899) and the colloquial, slangy and allusive French poetry of Jules Laforgue, echoed through the most important poem of the 20th century.” ―Jeffrey Meyers, The San Francisco Chronicle
“There has always been something utterly mysterious as well as alluring about T. S. Eliot, perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century. The triumph of Robert Crawford's magnificent life of this poet (up through the publication of The Waste Land, when Eliot was 34) is that he brings us close to the poet--his vulnerabilities and harsh defenses--without destroying his allure. Crawford has uncanny sympathy for Eliot, writing with a tight grip on his poetic intelligence. The life-and-work unfold seamlessly, with vivid and fresh details. Young Eliot is a book I will re-read soon, just to experience again the quiet unfolding of Eliot's genius, its flowering in the central poem of literary modernism. Himself a gifted poet, Crawford never puts a foot--or a word--wrong. This biography is an achievement, and it deserves a wide and welcoming readership.” ―Jay Parini, author of Robert Frost: A Life
“Robert Crawford, who had extraordinary access to the Eliot archives, digs deep for this biography of 'Tom' Eliot, writing about the early influences of his family and hometown of St. Louis . . .Crawford is the first biographer to enjoy full access to the Eliot archive, as well as permission to quote from the poet's work. As a result, he has produced the first volume of a biography that not so much supersedes Ackroyd and Gordon as it amplifies and enriches their contributions to an understanding of the man and the work . . .Even Eliot adepts will find much to savor in the new material at Robert Crawford's disposal, an impressive array of sources that he handles with care.” ―Carl Rollyson, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“*Starred review* Drawing extensively on new interviews, original research, and previously undisclosed memoirs, biographer [Robert] Crawford offers the first book devoted to T.S. Eliot's youth, painting a vividly colorful portrait of the artist as a young man . . . Crawford's masterly biography, with its great depth, attention to detail, and close reading of the youthful Eliot's writings, is likely to become the definitive account of the great poet's early years.” ―Publishers Weekly
“*Starred review* A masterful biography of the canonical modernist. . . Drawing on sources not available to previous biographers, the author fashions an authoritative, nuanced portrait. . . Although Crawford modestly claims that his biography is neither 'official' nor definitive, it is unlikely to be surpassed.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“*Starred review* The man whose The Bard dispelled the myths and mists about Robert Burns now publishes the first volume of a biography every bit as magisterial on the most consequential anglophone poet of the twentieth century. . . It's hard to imagine a literary biography of greater merit being published this year.” ―Booklist
About the Author
Robert Crawford is the author of Scotland's Books and the coeditor of The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. A fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, he is the Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews. The Bard, his biography of Robert Burns, was named the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year in 2009. Crawford's seven poetry collections include Testament and Full Volume, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize. He lives in Scotland.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Deeply researched, stylishly written
By Thomas J. Farrell
When I was an undergraduate T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" (1922) made a bigger impression on me than did James Joyce's experimental novel ULYSSES (1918). In each of these famous works, the respective author excels at allusions, and each uses mythic touchstones to construct his literary work.
As an English major at St. Louis University, the Jesuit university founded in 1818 in St. Louis, Eliot's home town, I read his collection of his literary criticism titled OF POETS AND POETRY (1957) in connection with a required course for English majors, Practical Criticism: Poetry, which I took from Fr. Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), the cultural historian and theorist. As a result, I was impressed with Eliot's knowledge of poetry and poets - and with his ability to articulate his views about the auditory imagination involved in poetry. Joyce excels in using the auditory imagination in ULYSSES, just as Eliot excels in using the auditory imagination in "The Waste Land."
When I took Fr. Ong's course, he was himself quite impressed with Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Poet" (1919). For Eliot, tradition in poetry was an important framework in which a poet lived and worked - a kind of extended family, as it were, of dead poets with whose poetry the living poet interacted and communed as he offered up his new poems. But that wasn't all. The living poet's new poems also resonated with the poems of the past and thereby brought them to new life, as it were.
Now, Robert Crawford is himself a poet from Scotland. In the book YOUNG ELIOT: FROM ST. LOUIS TO "THE WASTE LAND" (2015), Crawford writes admirably flowing prose. He sounds like he is talking to an old friend in his home about the personal life of their mutual friend Tom Eliot and his family and friends.
In his friendly voice, Crawford in effect says, "Let us go then, you and I, over Tom's life, starting with his growing up in St. Louis, his education at Harvard, and his relocation in England, including his important friendships with Ezra Pound and others."
Crawford says, "A distant ancestor, Andrew Eliot, had emigrated from East Coker in Somerset, England, to Beverly in Massachusetts around 1670" (page 12). So when T. S. Eliot relocated in England, his was moving back to the country of his family's ancestors.
But Eliot famously claimed that he was writing impersonal poetry in his 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Poet." Indeed, at times, "The Waste Land" sounds impersonal. Crawford says, "He [Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"] presents poetry as a demanding calling, and tradition as a form of communion linking the living to the dead" (page 332). The dead poets of the past are part of the collective unconscious in the human psyche.
However, I should mention that Crawford says that Eliot's actual family tree shows that he "was related, distantly, to poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell; to novelists Henry [sic] Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne; to memoirist Henry Adams; and to the second and sixth presidents of the United States, John Adams and John Quincy Adams" (page 12).
In St. Louis, Eliot's grandfather, "the Harvard-educated Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot," a "pillar of Unitarianism," was "founder of Washington University" (page 13). "Tom [Eliot] had never met Grandfather Eliot, who died in 1887" (page 17). "Straight out of Harvard Divinity School, Grandfather Eliot had reached St. Louis in 1834 and founded the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi" (page 17).
So T. S. Eliot's actual extended family was rather extensive long before he decided that he also should adopt an extended family of dead poets who were not actual blood ancestors.
But it is the ineluctable modality of creative writing that creative writing expresses the autobiography of the author, even when the author is deliberately involved in drawing on the resources of the collective unconscious in his psyche, as Eliot was involved in "The Waste Land." To his credit, Crawford highlights how certain important aspects of Eliot's personal life are expressed impersonally in "The Waste Land."
No doubt Eliot knew the depths of his psyche, including the collective unconscious in his psyche. Crawford says, "Written in Lausanne, this last section of the poem ["The Waste Land"] pivots between despair and saving guidance. Over a decade later, Tom [Eliot] told Virginia Woolf, `he wrote the last verses' of "The Waste Land" `in a trance - unconsciously,' and emphasized that `he did not like poetry that had no meaning for the ear'" (page 398).
Perhaps the acoustic imagination somehow evokes the collective unconscious in the human psyche.
No doubt the deep resonance of "The Waste Land" can be attributed in part to Eliot's acoustic imagination and in part to his use of myth. For example, he borrowed the imagery of the wounded Fisher King and the waste land from the medieval Christian Grail legends. In the Grail legends, the waste land appears to be an imaginative and fanciful way to express symbolically the woundedness of the Fisher King. Against the backdrop of the devastation of World War I, the waste land in Europe was real enough. No doubt the real enough desolation in Europe was matched by the emotional desolation Eliot and others felt as a result of the wholesale brutal slaughter of the war.
As Crawford makes clear, Eliot also had good personal reasons for feeling desolation about his personal life. Out of his deep desolation came "The Waste Land."
Crawford concludes his book with the following sentence: "It is as if he had never been young" (page 424). Yes, this impression of Eliot is really strong. Elsewhere, Crawford says, "He [Eliot] may have been thirty-one in late 1919, but he felt like an old man" (page 342).
You see, Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis. So he turned 31 in 1919, the year in which "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was published. He turned 34 in 1922, the year in which "The Waste Land" was published.
In terms of his chronological age when those two works were published, he was still a comparatively young man of extraordinary personal and professional maturity.
In terms of his chronological age when those two works were published, we could perhaps think of him as experiencing an early onset mid-life crisis. Perhaps the slaughter involved in World War I (1914-1918) contributed to his early onset mid-life crisis and to his maturity. Crawford says, "Almost a million British men had been killed in action; German and other losses were even higher" (page 342).
Crawford reports the following impressions that various people had of Eliot: "Reflecting on Tom [Eliot] in late February, Katherine Mansfield decided he was `attractive' yet `pathetic': `He suffers from his feelings of powerlessness. He knows it. He feels weak. It is all disguise. That slow manner, that hesitation, side long glances and so on are painful. And the pity is that he is too serious about himself, even a little bit absurd. But it's natural; it's the fault of London that. He wants kindly laughing at and setting free.' Mary Hutchinson felt similarly about this man she was so fond of, and `tried hard to "loosen him up."' [Ezra] Pound too perceived his good friend needed to be emancipated from at least some of his troubles, and strove to buy him time to write without anxiety" (pages 404-405).
In any event, World War I was followed by World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and other wars.
Symbolically, the wounded Fisher King has not recovered. As a result, Western culture to this day is symbolically the waste land.
We in Western culture today still need to find saving guidance.
According to Ong (mentioned above), our contemporary communications media that accentuate sound reached a certain critical mass by around 1960. As a result of the cultural conditioning of the communications media that accentuate sound, people in contemporary Western culture are undergoing deep tectonic shifts in their psyches. No doubt those tectonic shifts deep in the psyches enliven their acoustic imaginations and move them closer to the collective unconscious.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Exhaustively researched, well-written biography of T.S. Eliot
By Glynn Young
Before he was the winner for the Nobel Prize for Literature, before he was recognized for some of the most innovative and remarkable poetry of the 20th century, before “The Hollow Men” became one of the most recognizable poems in modern times, he was Tom Eliot, young Tom Eliot.
Thomas Stearnes Eliot was the youngest of six children, born in 1888 when his parents were 45. His siblings were considerably older than Tom. His was an upper class family in St. Louis, where his father was a vice president of a major brick manufacturer and his grandfather the founder of Washington University in St. Louis. His Unitarian family came from New England, and he was related to John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Henry Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
We’re more familiar with the latter half of Eliot’s career, from the time he was established as a poet of international renown, his Nobel Prize, and the poetry that in many ways helped to define Modernism in literary history. But before he was the famous poet, he was the boy, the young man at Harvard, and the expatriate in England.
In “Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land,” Robert Crawford explores the early Eliot in depth, covering the period from his birth to the publication of “The Waste Land” in 1922. Making use of letters, articles, other published resources and his own understandings of Eliot’s poems and poetry, Crawford draws a wonderfully three-dimensional portrait of the poet, including his growth and development, his flaws and failings, the relatively long incubation period for his poetry to become recognized, and the critical role played by how well Eliot fit into the literary circles of London from 1915 to 1922.
Crawford explains the huge impact that the discovery of the French Symbolist poets made on Eliot while a student at Harvard. His introduction was "The Symbolist Movement" in Literature by Arthur Symons (1899) and especially the poet Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), whose poetry is still in print. After graduation, Eliot spent a year studying in Paris. Eventually, he was accepted into Merton College, Oxford, for a year of study, but first went to the University of Marburg in Germany for a summer study session, which is where he was when World War I began in 1914. He was eventually allowed to leave, and reached England through neutral Holland.
England was where Eliot made his home from that time onward; the following year, he met Vivien (often spelled Vivienne) Haigh-Wood, and three months later they married. The marriage was troubled from the outset, with Vivien’s chronic illnesses and her affair with Bertrand Russell causing major stresses and fractures. Disliked by his literary friends, nonetheless Vivien, Crawford tells us, consistently championed Eliot’s poetry and what she considered her husband’s genius.
The circles the Eliots moved within the London literary scene included Ezra Pound (an early promoter of Eliot’s poetry), Bertrand Russell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and Edith Sitwell and her brother Osbert, among many others. Eliot had a serious knack for networking, and he utilized it to the fullest. Pound, for example, convinced the editor of Poetry Magazine in Chicago to publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who positioned it in the back of the magazine because he didn’t like it.
Crawford details all of the activities Eliot was involved in: literary journalism (articles and book reviews), his work at Lloyd’s Bank (which he found rather soothing), editing literary journals, and helping to promote other poets and writers like James Joyce. Eliot had a huge capacity for work. And he details the various influences leading up to the creation and publication of “The Waste Land.”
The author brings a wealth of research and understanding to the subject of Eliot. He is the Professor Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St. Andrews, and a fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. He’s the author of “The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot” (1991), as well as several works on Scottish literature, including “Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination 1314-2014,” “The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography” (2009), and “Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature” (2009). He is also a published poet, with six poetry collections, including “Talkies” (1992), “Masculinity” (1996), “Spirit Machines” (1999), “Full Volume” (2008), “The Tip of My Tongue” (2011), and “Testament” (2014).
What emerges from “Young Eliot” is a distinctly human figure, a man of enormous intellect and talent whose hard work and innovative poetry eventually would catapult him into being one of the literary icons of the 20th century. In an exhaustively researched and well-written work, Crawford tells us where that all came from.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
At first the book was tiresomely detailed--every repot card of ...
By Jackie Davis Martin
At first the book was tiresomely detailed--every repot card of Elio's grade school, and so on. But the book--and the writer's assiduous research--paid off when Eliot got to London. The reader is given much to think about in terms of writing, friendships, literary connections, and what makes people stay married. I had new insights into Eliot. I wanted the book to continue with his rest of his life, although the title made the limitations clear enough..
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