A wasted ‘life’ of The Waste Land

Image: Derek Turner The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem Matthew Hollis, Faber & Faber, 2022, 524pps., £20 LIAM GUILAR is disappointed by a would-be biography of the landmark poem If any twentieth century poem deserves a biography, it is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. First published in 1922, it was, and is,…

Joyce’s sense of history

Jacques-Emile Blanche 1861-1942. Portrait of James Joyce MICHAEL YOST explores Joyce’s life, work, and theory of art Homer’s Odyssey begins thus: “ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον…” or, in translation: “The man, to me, sing, O Muse, many-sided. . .”His word “polutropon” has been rendered as referring to a man “of twists and turns,” “of many…

Parnassus, and patria

Tumuli at Revesby in Lincolnshire Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry Various authors, edited by Alexander Adams, foreword by William Clouston, London: Bournbrook Press, 2022, pb, 55pps, £12.50 Bournbrook Press is an offshoot of Bournbrook Magazine, founded in 2019 to offer a “primarily British audience with traditionalist, socially conservative argument and entertainment”. This venture’s…

The epistolary Eliot

The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 8: 1936-1938 T.S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot, John Haffenden (eds.), Faber & Faber, 2019, 1,100pp + li, illus., £50 The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 9: 1939-1941 T.S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot, John Haffenden (eds.), Faber & Faber, 2021, 1,072pp + lxix, illus., £60 ALEXANDER ADAMS loses himself in a great…