How Did T.S. Eliot Go From Young and Wild to Old and Stodgy?
“Eliot After ‘The Waste Land,’” the second volume of Robert Crawford’s two-part biography, offers some answers — and some revelations.
Almost exactly 100 years ago, T.S. Eliot published a wildly experimental, cacophonous and moving poem of despair and spiritual hunger, forged in the flames and devastation of the First World War. Together with James Joyce’s equally groundbreaking experimental novel “Ulysses,” which appeared at the same moment, “The Waste Land” seemed to epitomize the radical new brand of art and literature that would come to be known as modernism; as Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound put it, the poem felt like “the justification of our modern experiment since 1900.” Even those who disliked it recognized the poem’s enormous significance and influence — the American poet William Carlos Williams, who viewed Eliot’s poetic project as the antithesis of his own, later lamented that “The Waste Land” “wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it.”
“Young Eliot” (2015), the first installment of Robert Crawford’s monumental two-part biography, took readers right up to the precipice of Eliot’s great breakthrough. In this masterly sequel, Crawford chronicles the fallout from that nuclear blast. How did the young, forward-thinking, avant-garde American poet become the stuffy, pious, conservative British citizen and Nobel laureate, bestriding the narrow literary world like a colossus? For readers partial to the daring rebel who wrote poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Preludes” and “The Waste Land,” the trajectory this book traces may feel a bit dispiriting, like watching a favorite punk musician turn into a Lawrence Welk fan fond of Fox News. But Crawford is an excellent guide to the intense personal pressures and cultural forces that fueled the dramatic transformations Eliot underwent in the wake of “The Waste Land.”
Drawing on revelatory new material — especially a vast trove of hitherto sealed letters that Eliot wrote to a woman we now know was the great, secret love of his life — Crawford provides a lively, illuminating narrative of the poet’s long second act. Trapped in what surely must have been one of the most disastrous and unhappy marriages in literary history, consumed with his own misery and anxiety, disgusted by modernity’s cultural disintegration, Eliot sought out stability and tradition wherever he could find them — chiefly in right-wing politics and the “ordering structure” of Christian faith.
Eliot’s deep hunger for order and fixed truths, his nostalgia for the cultural past, was hardly new: “The Waste Land” had already articulated “a desperate search for some frame of belief that may order chaos,” even if at that point it remained only “a maddeningly unattainable possibility.” By 1928, Eliot, now baptized and confirmed by the Anglican Church, was ready to declare his newfound allegiances with a “convert’s fervor” that shocked and troubled his family and old friends: “I am a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/books/review/robert-crawford-eliot-after-the-waste-land.html
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