Image: Derek Turner The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem Mathew 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,…
Ezekiel's vision The True Gods Attend You Clarence Caddell, Bonfire Books, 2022, 71 pages, £11.80 MICHAEL YOST finds a collection of original religiously-inspired verse rather forced There are two major traditions pertinent to verse literature that are seldom engaged in, but for all that are the more interesting when an artist does make use of…
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…
The Good and Evil Angels, by William Blake LUKE GILFEDDER examines the differences – and parallels – between two original thinkers In 1956 Colin Wilson published The Outsider, an overnight literary sensation which saw the 24-year-old autodidact hailed as a prodigy and the first home-grown British existentialist. He sent a copy to T.S. Eliot, who,…
Gustave Dore illustration for Paradise Lost BARRY SPURR rides to the rescue of the blind visionary When the Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, was at St Paul’s School in London, in the 1920s, John Milton’s 200-line pastoral elegy, ‘Lycidas’, was set for learning by heart by the boys. Decades later, when Berlin visited the newly-established Wolfson…
STODDARD MARTIN traces the connections and contrasts of two utterly different Americans George Santayana and Ezra Pound would have known of one another for decades before they ever corresponded, let alone met. Twenty-two years apart in age, they were at least a generation distant in sensibility and more than that in temperament. But Santayana was…