Just in case you aren't tired of reading the reviews of "Young Eliot":


http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/11/young-eliot-st-louis-waste-land-robert-crawford-review

The Guardian

Young Eliot: From St Louis to the Waste Land by Robert Crawford – review

A strait-laced upbringing and a disastrous marriage taught the young TS Eliot to camouflage his emotions

By Sarah Churchwell
Wednesday 11 February 2015 02.30 EST 


Excerpts:

Crawford’s masterfully researched chronicle enriches the familiar story of Eliot’s early years in St Louis, education at Harvard and Oxford, travels on the continent and ultimate residence in London. The first biography permitted to quote extensively from Eliot’s language, Young Eliot finally brings the poet’s life-defining gift into the story.


Quoting liberally from letters, memoirs, even student essays, Crawford diligently, and imaginatively, locates connections between the world Eliot encountered and the images used in his poems. “The soundscape of St Louis” in the late 19th century included Wagner, music hall and ragtime; all found their way into The Waste Land. Crawford has discovered in Eliot’s St Louis many of the names memorialised in his poems – Stetson, Sweany, even Prufrock.

Certainly Crawford’s new beginning is a raid on the forced inarticulacy of past ventures, and likely to prove a definitive one for some time to come.