... masterly ... For readers partial to the daring rebel who wrote poems like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes and The Waste Land, the trajectory this book traces may feel a bit dispiriting, like watching a favorite punk musician turn into a Lawrence Welk fan fond of Fox News. But Crawford is an excellent guide to the intense personal pressures and cultural forces that fueled the dramatic transformations Eliot underwent in the wake of The Waste Land ... Drawing on revelatory new material, Crawford provides a lively, illuminating narrative of the poet’s long second act ... Although there have been several important earlier accounts of Eliot’s life (including Lyndall Gordon’s superb 1998 biography), Crawford’s book is invaluable because it is the first to draw upon a gold mine that scholars have been dying to get their hands on for the past half-century — an archive of 1,131 letters that Eliot wrote to Emily Hale, an American woman he first fell in love with as a young graduate student ... Crawford handles this extraordinary, soap-operatic story with sensitivity and aplomb ... To his credit, Crawford does not shy away from the uglier, 'rebarbative aspects of his psyche' that have long been apparent — especially the misogyny, racism and antisemitism that run through Eliot’s life and work like diseased, cancerous tissue ... Tackling the poet’s contradictions head on, this book gives us a keenly nuanced, three-dimensional portrait of Eliot, warts and all ... Weaving together an enormous amount of material in exhaustive, sometimes exhausting detail, Crawford’s magisterial biography provides the fullest account to date of how Eliot transmuted his messy life and private struggles into art. Eliot may have strenuously promoted the influential argument that 'it is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting,' but readers of this fascinating, indispensable book will surely disagree.

... mesmerizing ... Crawford details, with remarkable scholarly evenhandedness, a life of almost soap-operatically 'complex, contradictory messiness' ... Crawford’s concentration on Eliot’s private life results in a partial picture, one that shifts the poet’s intellectual and artistic accomplishments to the background. So while these often harrowing revelations do grant us deeper insight into Eliot and consequently into his work, it is ultimately the poetry itself — and the criticism and drama — that we care about.

As Mr. Crawford surveys Eliot’s life after the publication of The Waste Land (1922), he wisely doesn’t aim at new 'readings' of Eliot’s poems, although he is careful not to neglect any one of them ... Mr. Crawford’s biographical net is a wide one, and I was more than once surprised and touched by something new that enriches the unpleasant Mr. Eliot into something other—richer and more strange ... For all his self-refashioning as a model Englishman, Eliot’s advice here seems to me very much in the American grain and strikes a note quite distinct from that of his august contemporaries. We should keep reading him with that note in mind.

... a rich study of the period from 1922 until Eliot’s death in 1965 – years that contained much besides a complicated love affair. Crawford’s book offers new and well-arranged details about Eliot’s plays and wartime life, a steady handling of his Anglicanism and antisemitism, intensive studies of the distress of his first marriage and the delights of his second – all while remaining commendably calm about the Hale letters. Still, it’s this correspondence that most justifies the need for another Eliot biography ... Without capitulating to the sensationalism of the romance plot, Crawford demonstrates that the letters refresh our sense of Eliot because they show him negotiating the ways in which his private life and public work converged ... Crawford does not choose to build a rounded sense of Hale from her own papers as compensation for the asymmetry of the correspondence (only Eliot’s half survives). Crawford’s reticence about Hale, except as she appears in Eliot’s letters, pushes readers of this biography towards a version of Eliot’s own position: an acute ‘conception’ of Hale but a fatal uncertainty about the way her reality might fit with the rest of his experience ... Crawford’s biography restores Eliot’s devotion to view while keeping its object shadowy ... Crawford is undeniably deft in his treatment of the poetry; he makes the soundscape of poems like ‘Marina’ shimmer. But does this volume do enough to resolve the relations between ‘the music and making of poetry’ and the mind of the ‘coldly reasoning, logically subtle theorist’ described (in that somewhat puzzling sobriquet) on the award of his Nobel Prize in 1948? Crawford’s bias towards the poetry can seem to thin his readings of Eliot just where they most need texture ... Crawford remains sharp on the legacy of Eliot’s early poems and the way the qualities of certain personae from them surface in other contexts when Eliot is trying to make sense of himself ... Crawford allows these quotations from the letters to dilate, without moralising, or even pointing to signs of strain in Eliot’s rhetoric. This wise decision to allow Eliot’s self-justifications to occupy significant space in the book, and to be self-convicting, serves the story best. But just occasionally readers may wish for Crawford to be less reticent on the subject of the emotional reverberations around Eliot’s grander monologues.

Detailed ... Crawford is able to address Eliot’s craft from the inside, to guide readers through the poet’s decisions and revisions, through his individual talent’s complex negotiations with tradition ... Crawford judiciously addresses the treatment of Jews in Eliot’s writing and is especially illuminating on Eliot’s own casuistry ... Crawford is a helpful guide to and interpreter of these aspects of Eliot’s life and work, but he also recognizes that the reason anyone is interested in Eliot is the poetry. One of his most impressive achievements here is the way he situates Eliot’s plays and poems in the complex problematics of the man’s life in all of its painful complexity.

Near the beginning of the second volume of Robert Crawford’s magisterial biography of TS Eliot, the problem for the biographer becomes clear. Eliot wrote, ironically in a letter, 'If I could destroy every letter I have ever written in my life I would do so before I die. I should like to leave as little biography as possible'...Eliot did vacillate from this position, but there was a perpetual reticence to his life...Crawford is the first biographer to have access to Eliot’s correspondence with Emily Hale, which was sealed for 50 years, and there is therefore a tranche of new detail, speculation and inference possible...But Crawford wisely states 'my aim is not to neaten his life, or reduce it to one expository template, but to let it emerge in its sometimes complex, contradictory messiness'...Eliot, however, is remembered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, not for his haphazard romantic life...Crawford places the Four Quartets in the context of war and depression, as much a work of ruination as The Waste Land but with a searing and redemptive quality...Eliot, in some ways, created a whole new key of poetry...Crawford does bring back a shocking Eliot...This book is properly complex, both in terms of the art and the life.

In this dismayingly thorough second volume of his biography of the poet, Eliot: After The Waste Land, Robert Crawford digs through the drifts, heaping shovelfuls of speeches and honorary degrees on to the helpless reader...It is our privilege to witness the author of The Waste Land (1922) engaging in such scintillating activities as 'speaking at a . . . celebration in Chichester after his return from a short Spanish holiday' and 'unveiling a plaque to Yeats'...One of the most painful elements of Crawford’s book concerns Eliot’s 'sense of humour,' which (in so far as it existed) suffered the twin deficiencies of being ponderous and racist...Eliot’s elephantine frivolities constituted a doomed attempt to escape his own seriousness, but also the tragedy of his personal life...He suffered 'a maddening feeling of failure and inferiority'...Crawford’s criticism of Eliot’s poetry is characterised by a brevity that might have enlivened his narration of the dinners and speaking engagements...One’s eventual sense of Eliot is, I suppose, of a man not at home in the world...Like many poets, he was doomed to feel more intensely than other people, but Eliot’s feelings — his mystical longings and civilisational anguishes — were especially difficult to contain in a human mind and especially prone to alienate him from other inhabitants of the 20th century.

It is impossible not to be moved by the final pages of Robert Crawford’s Eliot: After The Waste Land, in which the 20th century’s greatest poet at last finds contentment with his young wife Valerie. Much more than contentment ... Crawford’s work is impeccable ... Eliot plays his cards close to his chest: personally, politically. This can make him a tricky biographical subject in the 21st century, but Crawford – correctly – refuses to judge ... Crawford’s magisterial account sometimes feels overcrowded with details of this lecture given, or that essay published in a certain journal. Yet such comprehensiveness is, and will be, invaluable to scholars. And it means that the tender, elegiac final notes of this book are all the more striking. The portrait of the poet’s final years is one of joy – joy despite his own ill-health and the loss of many old friends to death’s reaping scythe. With his last breath Tom Eliot spoke his beloved wife’s name.

Even though Eliot is well shy of middle age at the start of this book, it’s still very much Old Eliot from first page to last ... The lives of poets often make for grim reading, and in this as in so much else, Eliot often outdoes his peers and progenitors ... Crawford completely succeeds. His two volumes combine to form the best life of TS Eliot by such a wide margin that it’s difficult to imagine any future biography equaling, let alone surpassing it. It’s not a happy story, but it’s complex, contradictory messiness is almost hypnotizing.

... if you see The Waste Land as the pinnacle of modernism and of Eliot’s achievement, then there’s an inevitable sense of anticlimax to the post-Waste Land life ... a maximalist biography of a minimalist poet ... Crawford’s seeming command of every letter Eliot wrote—and he wrote many—is admirable, and he doesn’t skimp on the great anecdotes ... At times, the book’s second half devolves into a desultory lecture tour ... this kind of sustained attention, one critic responding to the music of another, is largely absent from this second volume ... Though there have been several excellent accounts of the letters, Eliot After “The Waste Land” does something different, folding the missives into a synoptic vision of Eliot’s life and the many roles he played in it ... Crawford doesn’t offer a 'revisionist' account of Eliot’s career; there’s no need to revise when his tendencies toward nastiness have long been known. Rather, Crawford reminds us how remarkably stable the reputation of this unsettling poet has been, continues to be, and most likely will be. As Eliot knew, time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future ... In this year that marks the centennial of The Waste Land, what is to be gained by looking at all the years that came after? For one thing, these years remind us how much of the life of a great poet is lived outside the poetry: in romances imagined and achieved, in letters written and received, in friendships made and sustained ... Of the many rewards of Crawford’s biographical project, this is not the least of them: listening to the sometimes strained, often beautiful music of this strange friendship.

... authoritative ... After completing a two-volume biography, Crawford continues his meticulous, perceptive examination of the life and work of T.S. Eliot ... a finely detailed chronicle of the poet’s last four decades ... Exemplary literary scholarship.

The Nobel-winning poet and playwright Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) claws his way out of modernist despondency in this revelatory biography from Crawford...The author surveys the American-born Eliot’s life in London after the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, sharply dissecting the tensions between the public acclaim he received and his private turmoil and angst, with his political conservatism (and antisemitism), and in the moral certitudes of the Anglican Church, which he embraced in a religious turn that baffled other modernist literati...Braiding piquant detail with rich analysis ('In his life, he worried about his hernia; in his poetry, he turned again to structuring an account of modern existence on an ancient fertility ritual... balanced between feverish action and strict control'), Crawford illuminates the contradictions that make Eliot such a fascinating symbol of his times...The result is a rewarding look at a key literary figure.