“I was never quite a whole man,” Eliot wrote to Hale. Those letters cast some retrospective light on Eliot’s own sense of the creation of his era-defining poem. This is based on the new trove of 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Emily Hale, the drama teacher he fell in love with while at Harvard in 1912, who became his confidante and lover again in the 1930s. It has seen the second volume of Robert Crawford’s beautifully weighted biography of the poet ( Eliot After the Waste Land) and also, this month, the publication of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl. This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis.Īnother 50 years on that rebirth shows no sign of flagging. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien. Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. No other work of literature of the past century, or perhaps any century, feels quite so much a vivid breathing thing – ironically, since it is so consumed with death. Damyata.E ven if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land.

“DA Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms 410 DA Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus DA Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar 420 The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam ceu chelidon - O swallow swallow Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie 430 These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you.

Ts eliot the wasteland