Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, Faber (2022).

In the scale of biographical challenges, writing a book about T S Eliot and the twentieth century’s most popular poem, The Waste Land, must rank pretty highly. The hardback version of this biography is almost 400 pages with a further 150 pages, or so, of notes, index and the poem itself. A paperback version has been recently published but who would actually take this task on? The book is a mighty tome to read and not for the fainthearted.

Matthew Hollis, who was until recently poetry editor at Faber for 22 years and has a comprehensive biography of Edward Thomas under his belt, diligently takes us from Eliot’s roots in St. Louis to the London of the 1920s. There’s something painstaking about Hollis’s approach. Ezra Pound (Eliot’s editor of The Waste Land) is given the credit he deserves for the shaping of the poem. Their backgrounds, the multifarious, esoteric literary influences and the cultural zeitgeists that shaped their work are given context by Hollis.

Eliot’s early poems are explored, with his debts to numerous writers and movements, including Anglo-American imagism and French symbolism. It leaves the reader curious to know more about Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire; as well as exploring the patchwork of imagism that is embedded in his expansive work.

Hollis explores Eliot’s shifting religious convictions and the well-documented strain in his marriage to Vivien Eliot, as well as his complex relationship with Emily Hale. Some of the stories about Eliot and Vivien are painful to read, others amusing. Eliot can appear austere, high-minded and embedded in a transient lifestyle, moving frequently around London and weighted with financial and emotional burdens. 

Hollis explores Eliot’s antisemitism and other forms of racism, shining a light on the darkest parts of the poet’s life, alongside other modernist writers that had similarly abhorrent views. This examination is unflinching and tackles both the historical and current context of allowing prejudice to thrive unchecked in the literary community.

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"This examination is unflinching"

Hollis includes pertinent facts I didn’t know about literary magazines of the time, including the rivalry and feuds between writers and more information on figures, such as Richard Aldington, H.D. and Virginia and Leonard Woolf – this gives a multi-dimensional feel to the narrative. It felt, at points, as if I was witnessing events in real time and gaining valuable insights into the cultural context of the literary elite.

I enjoyed Hollis’s occasional poetic digressions (Hollis’s poetry is published with Bloodaxe, Incline, Clutag and Hazel Press), and the areas of the text where the episodic, formal tone of a biography becomes subtly disrupted by the poet’s unique voice. This provides another strand, or voice in the narrative, offsetting the complexities of the subject.

Eliot, for me, has always been a mystery (what was he really like? What actually made him tick?) and the sense of mystique surrounding his mighty reputation is lessened through the reading of this work – no doubt a healthy process. The biography has the effect of humanising the author and the process of the poem’s production. It’s all too easy to be in awe of The Waste Land, to be taken in, to be possessed by its prophetic aphorisms, its running, interweaving, echoing voices and the dizzying nature of its fragmented, intertextual form but the process of the writing appears to have been a somewhat stumbling and fragile process.

We realise that the early iterations were very messy - long-winded passages with a dreadful title taken from Dickens – ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’; that Eliot was a compulsive borrower from other texts, though he was (thankfully) to cite most of his sources, though one or two of his contemporaries were not happy. Most notable for me, Hollis's biography never shies away from Eliot's dependence on Pound's extensive editing and invaluable feedback 

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"Eliot was a compulsive borrower from other texts"

In light of Pound’s extensive revisions of the poem alongside Vivien’s significant input (both as a character to be drawn from and a literary critic in her own right), I was left feeling that Eliot was very fortunate to have these astute minds to advise him. Pound's savage edits and critical observations that shaped the work both linguistically and in terms of form, led me to the inevitable question -. should The Waste Land be seen as a co-production by at least two authors? I enjoyed discovering more about how Eliot harvested and repurposed a wealth of quotations. 

One of the functions of a good biography, or book of literary criticism, should be to deepen understanding and spark further personal investigation. I couldn’t find any aspect of Eliot or his work that the biography shies away from other than the persistent rumours about Eliot’s repressed sexuality, which are, at best, speculative and, at worst, idle gossip. This is a book that made me want to know more about Eliot’s life after The Waste Land. Indeed, his writing of Four Quartets and his long editorship at Faber. This could warrant a further edition looking even more at the legacy of The Waste Land or be a separate book – Eliot: The Twilight Years. Something for the biographer to consider?

I read this book on holiday over three days and found it to a highly informative read that seems to effortlessly slip back into the times with all the minutiae of a poem and poet’s life presented with the assured manner of a steely-eyed, yet patient biographer. Highly recommended.

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Review by Matthew. M. C. Smith is the author of The Keeper of Aeons and is academically published on the subject of Robert Graves and Wales. He is campaigning for the Red Lady of Paviland to return to Swansea from Oxford and edits Black Bough Poetry, an imagist journal. Twitter: @MatthewMCSmith Also on Insta, FB and Bluesky.

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​​Black Bough are two years into a collaborative project inspired by The Waste Land. This is being edited by Guest Editor Kitty Donnelly.