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). “April is the cruellest month” — what college student (or taxpayer) hasn’t, at this time of year, ruefully murmured its opening words? If Eliot’s haunting mélange of quotation, lugubrious reflections on life and love, and achingly beautiful word-music has any serious rival for modern poetry’s Number One spot it would probably be his own later, almost liturgical “Four Quartets” (1943).
While Eliot’s poems continue to be greatly loved, their author himself is another matter. As Robert Crawford notes in the introductory pages of “Young Eliot” — which tracks in enthralling, exhaustive detail the poet’s life up to the book publication of “The Waste Land” — Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) has since his death become nearly as controversial a figure as his friend Ezra Pound. He’s been labeled anti-Semitic and elitist, as well as a religious nut, an abusive husband, a cuckold and a prig. Some of these accusations are, at least partly, true. And yet the same man could be wholly admirable — generous, loyal, immensely kind.
Earlier biographies — the best is Lyndall Gordon’s — have somewhat scanted Eliot’s American childhood and youth, which is one reason this new book is so valuable. It is magisterial in its minutiae. It covers the poet’s family life in St. Louis and his summer holidays in Gloucester, Mass., his early schooling and reading, the years at Harvard and his bittersweet love for Emily Hale, literally the girl he left behind when he moved to England. To humanize a figure often (wrongly) regarded as coldly marmoreal, Crawford calls his subject “Tom” throughout. He also promises a second volume sometime after Hale’s letters become available to scholars in 2020.
Crawford nearly always relates his discoveries to the poetry, at times quite subtly, as when he notes that Eliot’s sister Margaret was sensitive to the sound of thunder (the last section of “The Waste Land,” titled “What the Thunder Said”).
But Crawford, who is a professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of St. Andrews, also interweaves several ongoing themes. Eliot grew up the scion of a distinguished family of preachers, educators and wealthy businessmen (his father owned a brick factory).
As the youngest of six surviving children, Tom was distinctly cosseted, especially by his doting mother (who wrote poetry). The reserved, physically delicate boy — he was born with a double hernia and needed to wear a truss; children mocked his big ears — never played sports and seems to have had almost no close friends.
Poignantly, Crawford closes his superb biography with Tom picking up the first edition of “The Waste Land” and realizing that from that moment on he was, forever more, T.S. Eliot.
BIOGRAPHY: POET
“Young Eliot: From St. Louis to ‘The Waste Land’ “
by Robert Crawford (Farrar Straus Giroux)
