Eliot After The Waste Land

The second volume of Robert Crawford's biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man, Eliot After The Waste Land, tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life. It explores his religious conversion, editorship at Faber and Faber, separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood, and second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, as well as his great work Four Quartets. Crawford presents Eliot as a human being, struggling to make art among personal disasters.

Format: Hardback
Length: 624 pages
Publication date: 02 June 2022
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

In this captivating and thorough exploration of the twentieth century's most influential poet, Robert Crawford concludes the narrative he began in Young Eliot. Through the use of extensive new sources and letters, this is the first comprehensive biography to leverage Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) that detail his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale. This eagerly anticipated second volume, Eliot After The Waste Land, delves into the life of the mature Eliot, his years as a renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled inner world.

From his post-The Waste Land days as a fatigued bank employee to the emotional upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a fire watcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford uncovers the public and personal experiences that influenced the creation of some of Eliot's masterpieces. He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood, and his happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, as well as his renowned work Four Quartets.

Rather than presenting Eliot as a literary monument, Robert Crawford portrays him as a human being: a husband, lover, and widower, a banker, editor, playwright, and publisher, but most importantly, as an epoch-shaping poet who struggled to create art amidst personal tragedies.

Weight: 924g
Dimension: 241 x 163 x 54 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780224093897