The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

Praise for The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

Hollis combines a poet’s sharp eye for details with a cultural historian’s grasp of atmosphere.… The richness of [his] analysis is evident on every page.
— Jason Harding - Financial Times

Hollis delves into the deep background from which The Waste Land arose.… There is genuine suspense in the air, as Hollis invites us to listen out for murmurs and rumors, in the poet’s letters of long ago.


— Anthony Lane - The New Yorker

[Matthew Hollis] creates stunning juxtapositions of context and text. A repossession of The Waste Land is the chief effect of reading his book. But the structure of the book is itself a work of art.


— Helen Vendler - Times Literary Supplement

Hollis succeeds brilliantly in bringing the literary landscape of the 1920s to life.… [He] turns a complex process of literary composition into a rattling good story. His criticism is personally engaged...and wonderfully compelling as a result.
— Tristram Fane Saunders - Sunday Telegraph

[Hollis] examines, with amazing forensic diligence, the context and fraught composition of the most famous poem of the 20th century. The clarifying light in each case is exemplary. The celebrated ‘difficulty’ of [Eliot, Pound] and their work was revealed as perhaps not so difficult at all.
— William Boyd, New Statesman, Book of the Year

[Hollis’s] quest is for all the seeds of intellectual and emotional pressure that shaped the poem. Such is the energy and engagement of Hollis in this task that you find yourself rooting for the emergence of the poem along with Eliot and his supporters, willing it into life as the book progresses.… The evolution of those pages...have become folkloric among Eliot’s readers, but still Hollis invests them with fresh life.
— Tim Adams - Observer

With elegance, wit and...warmth, [Hollis] tells the story of The Waste Land’s difficult birth.… At times the book reads, delightfully, as a group biography of modernism’s bright lights.


— Susannah Goldsborough - Times [UK]

[A] rewarding literary dive into the alchemy of a classic, from Eliot’s leap of courage to Pound’s scorched-earth battle for respect with Poetry magazine in Chicago.


— Christopher Borrelli - Chicago Tribune

[The Waste Land] brings to life the exciting, even overheated, creative environment in which the poem came into being.… Meticulously grounding his account in time and place and paying close attention to the interplay of poetic intuition and critical mind, Hollis succeeds in gripping our attention.


— Hilary Davies - Literary Review

Illuminating.… Hollis blends rich characterization and historical background to create a vivid picture of the London literary scene.… Hollis’s sharp prose sings and is poetic in its own right.… This fascinating and brilliantly researched history will delight Eliot’s fans.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An authoritative and beautifully written account of the peculiar alchemy that produced the most influential poem of the twentieth century. This is more than the story of T. S. Eliot's genius: Matthew Hollis reveals how the forces of friendship, love, despair, madness, and ambition shaped The Waste Land. Literary history at its finest.


— Heather Clark, author of Red Comet

A great work of art takes on a life of its own. This is the strategy equally artful and assessive of Matthew Hollis's superb new study, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. The poem is brilliant, infuriating, moody, conflicted, lyrical, fractured, wildly inventive, haunted by tradition, and as full of eroticism as lament. The Waste Land helped to define modernism and lives on vividly into our present day. To tell the life story of this poem, Hollis tells the story of the poet, sometimes minute by minute, conversation by conversation. The moving result—as Whitman would say of his own sweeping poetry—is that 'who touches this [book] touches a man.'


— David Baker, author of Whale Fall and professor of English at Denison University