In the centenary year of Eliot world-renowned masterpiece, join biographer Robert Crawford to explore the inner life of this revolutionary modernist and visionary poet.

No-one is better placed to reveal the inner life of this complex and troubled figure than the poet and critic Robert Crawford. The last biographer to have interviewed anyone who knew Eliot when The Waste Land was published, he is also the first to have access to an archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing Eliot’s decades-long affair with Emily Hale.

From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford will reveal the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot’s masterpieces.

He will explore the poet’s religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets.

Most important of all, Crawford will present Eliot not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.