Publishers Weekly
★ 01/26/2015
Drawing extensively on new interviews, original research, and previously undisclosed memoirs, biographer Crawford (Scotland’s Books) offers the first book devoted to T.S. Eliot’s youth, painting a vividly colorful portrait of the artist as a young man. In exhaustive, and often exhausting, detail, Crawford chronicles, year-by-year, the young Eliot: his childhood, divided between St. Louis and Massachusetts; his painful shyness and love of dancing; his years at Harvard, his post-Harvard experiences in Europe and first, though unrequited, love ; his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood; and his early publications of poetry, leading up to The Waste Land’s release in 1922. Eliot’s affinity for the sacred is traced to his upbringing in an “idealistic, bookish household,” to his keen ear for St. Louis’s rich confluence of music—both opera and jazz—and to his love of birdsong. Readers also learn about Eliot’s difficult marriage to Haigh-Wood, which brought neither of them happiness, though Eliot wrote to Ezra Pound that “it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” 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. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Associates. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
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
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2014-12-21
A masterful biography of the canonical modernist.In this first of a proposed two-volume life of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Crawford (Modern Scottish Literature/Univ. of St. Andrews; On Glasgow and Edinburgh, 2013, etc.) examines the poet's youth and early career, ending with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Drawing on sources not available to previous biographers, the author fashions an authoritative, nuanced portrait. Eliot was the seventh child of a wealthy St. Louis family whose provincialism he was determined to escape. Drawn to poetry even as a teenager, he fell into "an intense engagement" with the 19th-century Romantics. At Harvard, where he was a mediocre student, he discovered the French symbolists, especially Jules Laforgue, whose poems possessed "a compulsively insinuating music" that Eliot began to imitate. Not surprisingly, he yearned to go to Paris, a plan his doting, overprotective mother sternly discouraged. Nevertheless, in 1910, Eliot sailed for Europe, enrolling in classes with the groundbreaking sociologist Emile Durkheim, psychologist Pierre Janet and philosopher Henri Bergson, thinkers who stimulated Eliot's ideas "about the intersection between religious mysticism, asceticism, and hysteria in ‘primitive' and modern life." In 1914, he again left America, this time for a year at Oxford that proved life-changing: He met Ezra Pound, who responded to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with exuberant praise. Pound opened doors, and by 1920, married, living in London, editing and reviewing while working full-time at a bank, Eliot had become "one of the best networked younger figures in London literary publishing." Crawford illuminates Eliot's tormented first marriage to the volatile Vivienne Haigh-Wood; his complicated relationships with Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf; and his struggle to find an American publisher. Most crucially, he explores the swirling aesthetic and philosophical forces that shaped Eliot's startling poetry. Although Crawford modestly claims that his biography is neither "official" nor definitive, it is unlikely to be surpassed.
