Robert Crawford

Distinguished poet and St Andrews Professor Robert Crawford will be joining us to discuss his acclaimed second volume about the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, T.S. Eliot, drawing on extensive new sources.

In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot’s most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale. This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After The Waste Land, tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life.

Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man 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.