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Lead book review

Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?

Reviewing Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot, Daniel Swift suspects that the poet’s genius has been over-explained and over-simplified

31 January 2015

9:00 AM

31 January 2015

9:00 AM

Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land Robert Crawford

Jonathan Cape, pp.493, £25

The musical Cats reopened in the West End in December, with a judge from The X Factor in the lead role. The music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the songs are, of course, by T.S. Eliot. Eliot died 50 years ago this year, and retains a curious kind of fame, which encompasses West End musicals and scholarly collections of his letters, lovingly published by Faber (most recently, Volume 5: 1930–1931.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £20 Tel: 08430 600033. Daniel Swift’s latest book is Shakespeare’s Common Prayers. He is currently at work on a project about Ezra Pound.

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