Photo Credit: Alfred Eisenstaedt / LIFE

Young Eliot takes T. S. Eliot from his childhood in St. Louis right up to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. This book gives a much fuller account of Eliot’s life than ever before, and shows just how intensely the life shaped the poetry. In writing this unofficial biography, Robert Crawford is the first biographer who has been allowed to quote extensively from Eliot’s published and unpublished writings. For U.S. and U.K. copyright reasons, links to texts are not provided: Eliot was a canny publisher.

Since Eliot was restlessly intelligent, produced in The Waste Land a work of endless hypertext, and enjoyed pictures of cats, he might well have relished the Internet. However, he studied some pretty alarming advanced mathematics courses, and might have been unforgiving if this top 10 had turned out to be an 11. This is a pity, since I’d have liked to cram in “Burnt Norton” as well: freighted with memory and desire, its sense of “the passage which we did not take” makes it a moving counterpart to Frost’s equally middle-aged “The Road Not Taken.”
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