Eliot’s ‘wretched old’ typewriter looms large in an analysis of The Waste Land

In 2018, the ferocious American poet-critic William Logan took time off from routinely, invigoratingly eviscerating contemporary poets to write Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past – a study of classic poems in their historical contexts. It was an informative, interesting exercise, prefaced by this significant reservation: ‘Knowledge of the circumstance is not ipso facto knowledge of the poem.’

Matthew Hollis attempts something similar: an immersion in the verité, the lost circumstances of composition. His subtitle, ‘A Biography of a Poem’, is a brilliant piece of marketing, a hook, an attractive promise of something new and original. Does it deliver? Or is it only a fancy way of describing the milieu, the ragbag of circumstance, from which T.S. Eliot’s great poem emerged?

For example, we learn that Ezra Pound suffered at the hands of frenemies.