Eliot After The Waste Land

Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including two major biographies of T.S. Eliot: Young Eliot and Eliot After The Waste Land. Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards as well as the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

The second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources. 
 
In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale. 
 
This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After 'The Waste Land', tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life. 
 
From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces. 
 
He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets. 
 
Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

The Scottish Ambassador

The eighth collection from the major Scots poet and biographer

Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte... This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts.

Robert Crawford’s collection [The Scottish Ambassador] is a book of celebrations… The long, unrhymed lines fizz with welcoming particulars and jolly japes.

The book is trying to sing Scotland, but also Scotland as part of a much wider realm… Cultural references range from Madame Butterfly to ancient Assyria. If it's a vision of Scotland, it's a complex, expansive one.

Vivid, nuanced and joyous… [The Scottish Ambassador is] a marvellous and marvelling collection, at once worldly and homely.

One of Scotland’s most celebrated poets, Robert Crawford has long been a passionate and articulate ambassador for his country and its culture, its people and its landscape. The Scottish Ambassador fuses individual and communal voices in poems that resonate far beyond their points of origin. Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford’s poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy. He negotiates with intensity and wit between a deep sense of human universals and a heartfelt fidelity to individual places. Ranging from Jerusalem to Iona, New York City to Shetland, this is a collection of international range that continually zeroes in on the particular – and the particularly Scottish. At the book’s centre is a series of intimate, funny, eloquent portraits of cities which are at once remarkable public poems and outpourings of love.

From St Louis to The Waste Land

Young Eliot

A biography exploring the early years of the twentieth century’s greatest poet.

Young Eliot marks both a milestone and a turning point... [It] is judicious, sympathetic, meticulous.... The story it tells of a great poet’s early life is enthralling.

This is an exemplary book… I look forward to the second volume eagerly.

A masterful biography of the canonical modernist... Drawing on sources not available to previous biographers, the author fashions an authoritative, nuanced portrait... Although Crawford modestly claims that his biography is neither “official” nor definitive, it is unlikely to be surpassed.

Crawford’s superb biography, of which this is the first of two volumes, must now be regarded as the standard work. It does not diminish or tarnish Eliot’s reputation. On the contrary, it makes one want to return to the poems and read them again and again.

Crawford’s case is sensitive and compelling, and his account – especially of Eliot’s childhood and student years – is more richly detailed than any previous biographer’s…. A powerful and enlightening book.

[An] excellent account of the poet as a young man.

[Crawford] is a reliable and succinctly guide to the many intellectual influences that shaped [Eliot].

This is very much what a literary biography should be. It is likely to be a while before the next volume…but it will be worth the wait if it does what this first book does: to offer a credible and three-dimensional portrait of this most elusive figure.

Crawford has produced a nuanced portrait of Eliot’s greatness.

This life of the young TS Eliot up to the Waste Land is more richly detailed than any before.

[Crawford’s] intention is never reductive, always to help us understand Eliot’s triumph in transmuting his private suffering into “language that acquired almost infinite reach”.

The first biography permitted to quote extensively from Eliot’s language, Young Eliot finally brings the poet’s life-defining gift into the story.

Robert Crawford demonstrates wonderfully well how every experience of Eliot’s life…went into a melting pot from which his poetry emerged.

Mr Crawford presents Eliot as he finds him: a nervous, unhappy individual who was also…a brilliant poet. Few writers offer such a richly complex subject matter. Even fewer biographies offer such a fair assessment of the man.

It allows us to see more clearly than ever the circumstances under which this revolutionary work was created.

Earlier biographies have somewhat scanted Eliot’s American childhood and youth, which is one reason why this new book is so valuable. It is magisterial in its minutiae.

This comprehensive study of T.S. Eliot’s first thirty-four years humanizes one of the twentieth century’s most learned and inscrutable poets.

Where so often we go to Eliot’s poems for a glimpse at humanity, Crawford helps us find something human, a man who dares to “[d]isturb the universe”.

It must be the most detailed study [of Eliot] so far, meticulous in its documentation and eloquent in its execution.

Robert Crawford’s excellent biography […] brings a vastly expanded sense of the poet’s life and personality.

·         Robert Crawford tracks the poet’s young life in enthralling, exhaustive detail and nearly always relates his discoveries to the poetry.

A shrewd, sensible, illuminating account that presents intriguing material from a number of fresh sources.

A learned, important book, with exhilarating narrative scope.

More richly detailed than any previous biographer’s… A powerful and enlightening book.

Never has the physical and familial background of Eliot’s childhood in St Louis, Missouri, been so well explored… Crawford’s clear and lively narrative offers a warm and vital account of the writer’s extraordinary metamorphosis from cosseted youngest child in mid-America to revolutionary poet and unhappy lover in London. No devotee of his work will want to miss this book – and, whenever it comes, its sequel.

Published simultaneously in Britain and America to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot, this major biography traces the life of the twentieth century’s most important poet from his childhood in the ragtime city of St Louis right up to the publication of his most famous poem, The Waste Land. Meticulously detailed and incisively written, Young Eliot portrays a brilliant, shy and wounded American who defied his parents’ wishes and committed himself to life as an immigrant in England, authoring work astonishing in its scope and hurt. 
 
Quoting extensively from poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews, archives, and previously undisclosed memoirs, Robert Crawford shows how Eliot’s background in Missouri, Massachusetts and Paris made him a lightning conductor for modernity. Most impressively, Young Eliot shows how deeply personal were the experiences underlying masterpieces from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot wanted no biography written, but this book reveals him in all his vulnerable complexity as student and lover, stink-bomber, banker and philosopher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

Testament

On the brink of the referendum on independence, the first collection in six years from this major Scottish poet

Crawford’s poetic voice has a calm lucidity, never ostentatious or wilfully obscure… Poets are better with metaphors than politicians.

To make a testament is to attempt to pass on what matters most. In his seventh full-length collection of poems Robert Crawford writes of love, loss, belief, and commitment. Whether in intimate erotic lyrics or in a sustained engagement with the politics of Scottish independence he writes with passion, wit, and assurance about struggles to pass on values and treasures. The book opens with a sequence of love poems, and closes with ‘Testament’, a startlingly fresh gathering of deftly rhymed paraphrases based on the New Testament. Whether making versions of Cavafy or elegising fellow poet Mick Imlah, or writing how a father hands on a piece of marble to his son, Robert Crawford shows in Testament how poetry can communicate from generation to generation aspects of what makes us most vulnerably and engagingly human.

Selected Poems

A distillation of the best work from one of Scotland's leading contemporary poets.

The voice of this poetry is engaging and likeable.

His Selected Poems is a revelation. Crawford is a very fine poet indeed. This book is aglitter with surprise, with new ways of seeing, of hearing, and of feeling... This astounding collection, rich also in wit, is a book to be homesick for.

Taken from his first six books, these poems confirm Robert Crawford as a poet of exhilarating energy wedded to a constantly refreshing delight in nuanced language. Richly nourished by his background, Crawford's work is both lyrical and wry. Its intelligent humour and attunement to our technological present are impressively fused with a deepening note of spirituality. Unpredictable yet recognisable, these are poems of beguiling vitality. 
 
While readers have praised Crawford's lovingly lyrical engagement with politics and science in such collections as A Scottish Assembly (1990) and Spirit Machines (1999), with gender in Masculinity (1996), or with environment and spirituality in The Tip of My Tongue (2003), what emerges in this Selected Poems is a clearly growing commitment to the protean delight of poetry itself: a belief in its uniqueness as a medium which can subtly sound out complex relationships with heartfelt intelligence. In Crawford's language there is a confidently contemporary Scottish music that celebrates a kinship between the cherished, minute detail, local or personal, and the magnificently universal, 'As a candle-flame believes in the speed of light'.

Masculinity

The finest collection yet from the New Generation poet.

In MASCULINITY, Robert Crawford elegantly explores many aspects of that troubling concept, from imperial militarism to his own experiences as father, husband, and son. By turn affectionate and amusing, painful and self-excoriating, Crawford wryly examines, sometimes in intimate detail, what it is to be male - from awkward, unsporty and even more awkward adolescent, to husband, father of a child and, apparently, New Man. Clever, accessible, very funny and chillingly accurate, MASCULINITY is a sparklingly original collection. Star Trek Epigrams Mr Sulu, set the controls To Economy Wash. We're about to venture Where no man has gone before. Kirk to enterprise: 'I'm going back to my cabin With a box of Kleenex. I want to experience the lonliness of Command. '

Robert Crawford

Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte... This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts

Scotsman, praise for THE SCOTTISH AMBASSADOR

A thorough, solid sequel to Crawford's much-praised Young Eliot... This biography is going to play a large part in any future assessment of Eliot

Spectator, praise for ELIOT AFTER THE WASTE LAND

For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful poetry collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot 
 
'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed' Sunday Herald 
 
Mixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, Old World explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth. 
 
These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable. 
 
Writing out of older Scottish traditions that are intellectually deft and linguistically complex, Robert Crawford stands as a contemporary master of poetry. 
 
‘A poet of great importance… fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time’ Scotsman 
 
'In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ Herald

Robert Crawford

Praise for Old World

Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte... This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts

A thorough, solid sequel to Crawford's much-praised Young Eliot... This biography is going to play a large part in any future assessment of Eliot

For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets

Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte... This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts

A thorough, solid sequel to Crawford's much-praised Young Eliot... This biography is going to play a large part in any future assessment of Eliot

For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets

Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte... This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts

A thorough, solid sequel to Crawford's much-praised Young Eliot... This biography is going to play a large part in any future assessment of Eliot

For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets

Books by Robert Crawford

Series by Robert Crawford

Eliot Biographies

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter