If you are looking for the 'origin story' of 'The Waste Land', then this is certainly for you; however, be aware that by the time the poem has been completed within the narrative, the book effectively closes. Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis. Though often plagued by ill-health – nearly all the characters in The Waste Land cough their way through “the brown fog” of London’s winter dawns – the Eliots inhabit their times with surprising physical vigour. These tensions, as he shows, were mostly played out in literary quarterlies whose circulation was almost exclusively friends and rivals.

Out of that dryness, out of his own desiccation, Eliot made progress on the poem that he’d had in mind for many months. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. If you are a devotee of twentieth century poetry, you are almost certain to understand The Waste Land in greater depth.It’s a testament to his own talent at dissecting his subject matter and infusing it with imaginative empathy that the reader comes away from his “biography” ready to look at The Waste Land with fresh eyes. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life.

And “a new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien.He charts Eliot’s peculiar upbringing in St Louis, Missouri, his conflicted relationship with his mother and the horror that was his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, who lived almost the last decade of her life in a psychiatric hospital. It's a testament to his own talent at dissecting his subject matter and infusing it with imaginative empathy that the reader comes away from his "biography" ready to look at The Waste Land with fresh eyes. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

In his “London Letter”, written for the American review The Dial in July 1921, Eliot noted: “The vacant term of wit set in early this year with a fine hot rainless spring. This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. The Waste Land lends itself so well to this kind of social narrative because it was almost a collective project.The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which I would never have written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps, I may be said to have had the life I needed. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Hollis brilliantly sifts through the tendrils of TS Eliot's unhappiness and shows how, with help from friends, he broke through his tortured silence to create an era-defining poem . When Eliot included a fragment of that marital neurosis in The Waste Land – “My nerves are bad tonight.