The Waste Land, a Biography

 Matthew Hollis, The Waste Land, a Biography of a Poem (Faber)

Reading two big books on T.S. Eliot in the space of a few months could be hazardous to one's state of mind. He's not such good company as Dr. Johnson, a dispiriting figure always ailing with one complaint or another. The second half of Robert Crawford's biography in the summer mainly served to remind us what a gruelling read the first volume was but not all reading is purely for pleasure. Some books, even now, still need to be read because they are 'important'. Both Johnson and Eliot were major contributors to poetry criticism, it's just that one made it, and everything else, more enjoyable than the other. But while Prof. Crawford wrote the life of the poet, Matthew Hollis writes the life of the poem which, while overlapping with that of its author, is a different thing. And while Crawford was scholarly, Hollis is a better writer. 

The Waste Land's biography, like the poem itself, is augmented by notes and so not quite as big as it looks. Only 388 of its 524 pages are the text. There's something infectious in these books so learned that so much extraneous explication is required that it becomes integral. For me, the high church of C20th English poetry that is difficult by design includes is at fault for fancying that it needs to be like that. And much of the story of how Matthew Hollis shows The Waste Land coming into being is the very antithesis of any claim it had to be like Keats for who, 'if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all'. What Eliot takes from Keats, or thinks he does, is how he,

sought to overturn the conviction of the Lyrical Ballads that 'all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'

which he makes into his manifesto point that,

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

And if we must have such maxims about what poetry is or isn't, that's not the worst.

388 pages of how a poem came into being must involve a lot of detailed background and this, more than a biography of a poet, overturns the orthodoxy we were taught some 40-odd years ago that the text is all there is. Not many poems are as complex as The Waste Land and would need quite such analysis of its DNA but Hollis brings together many tributaries, like those of the Mississippi-Missouri, to show how it happened.

Not far from the 'escape from personality' is Eliot's idea of the 'objective correlative', 

a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,

which might have made poetry sound more like a science than an art but in a passage that puts Ezra  Pound's Canto VII alongside Eliot's poem, the 'confluence' between the two is too clear to be uncanny. It refutes those who claim that textual similarities in Shakespeare and Marlowe are evidence that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare because here are Pound and Eliot doing the same thing, because they knew each other, read each other but were lucky enough not to have copyright lawyers finding their clients' ideas in the each other's work.

To simplify The Waste Land to one simple sentence, Eliot finds an 'objective correlative' in post-WW1 Europe for his own exhausted, derelict psychological condition. It's only how much he brings to it that makes it complicated and how its fragmentary state can be seen as a coherent work without claiming that it is its fragmentary nature that brings it together. It wasn't until very late that it became a poem in 5 parts rather than 4 when Death by Water was put back in.

Rather than the notes provided by Eliot or the subsequent Student's Guide to the Selected Poems by B.C. Southam, this book should hereon in be the place for student's of the poem to go for guidance but students, rather than readers, is all it will properly have because nobody, neither now or then, will pick it up, read it and 'get it' as one would with poems by Hardy, Edward Thomas or Larkin. Hollis ends with two pages of quotes from contemporary reviews, such as that it,

may be nonsense as a whole, but is certainly a sporting attempt to turn accident into substance.

In the final exams on C20th English Literature at Lancaster University in 1981, I had intended to answer whatever question there was about T.S. Eliot. I thought I ought to. When I saw the question I wasn't so sure and thought about it while leaving it until last and doing three other essays. Finally, I decided to cobble together some thoughts on a question about Yeats that suited me better and I'm sure it was a good decision.

The biography's last appendix is the poem. It takes maybe 15 minutes to read and by now is full of its own quotes as well as those from Marvell, Spenser, Thomas Kyd and all and one gets the point much more than one immediately does of Finnegan's Wake. There is much to admire in the restrained diction, the 'impersonality' and the way that the fragments add up to more than their constituent parts. What we owe to Eliot, and we are never left in much doubt about how much he owed to Pound in his turn, is how the poetry is better for not being too self-indulgent, however much Eliot himself was. Not everybody has taken the point and poetry has had to be repaired once or twice since but we are in his debt without having to admire everything about him.