YOUNG ELIOT - FROM ST. LOUIS TO "THE WASTE LAND"

TITLE - YOUNG ELIOT - FROM ST. LOUIS TO "THE WASTE LAND"

WRITTEN BY - ROBERT CRAWFORD 

PUBLISHED BY - JONATHAN CAPE 

PUBLICATION DATE - AVAILABLE NOW

A reluctant biographee, many of his personal papers and letters were destroyed at his own request, however “Young Eliot” examines the poet’s formative years in much more detail than previous biographers have devoted to them. Drawing on hitherto untapped sources and documents, Robert Crawford has written a definitive and personal, though unofficial, biography which reveals the human being behind the legend.

A seemingly ordinary, slightly timid young man stares out from the dust-jacket. Referred to as “Tom” throughout the book,  Crawford paints an unvarnished portrait of a young man, brilliant but human. Young Tom would’ve often displayed the casual racism and sexism of the time, but Crawford doesn’t ignore Eliot’s failings in favour of a hagiography. Nor does he gloss over the bawdy poetry Eliot wrote at Harvard, an university he was nearly thrown out of for “loafing”, achieving lacklustre grades in the process.

As expected in a two-volume work, the biographical detail is intensive. Crawford begins right at the beginning, examining Eliot’s birth into quite a large family with several much older siblings, his school life and early forays into poetry. Each chapter of Eliot’s life is vividly detailed as Crawford skilfully charts his development as a poet up to and including the publication of “The Waste Land”. There is much in this work that even the most dedicated Eliot scholar will find surprising and new.

Two sections of revealing photographs are included, each snapshot loaded with meaning and poignancy, along with notes and an index. Scholarly, intelligent and accessible, “Young Eliot” is a joy to read and must surely be hailed as the beginning of a definitive biography of T. S. Eliot.