I heard Craig Raine interviewed on the radio about this book.[1] Didn’t he feel, he was asked, that his often abrasive dismissals of fellow critics (“execrable,” “stupid”) lowered the standards of academic writing? His answer was contemptuous: “Yeah, but who reads academic writing, for God’s sake?”

Well, quite a few people do—he has even read some himself—and they will have to go on doing so if they want real help in understanding T. S. Eliot. Raine’s book, in a series called “Lives and Legacies,” gives a biographical chronology, and adopts a chaotic approach to Eliot’s work, the continuity and development of which are obscured. There is no mention of Emily Hale, a key figure in Eliot’s life, in the chronology or the text. Raine is outraged, on behalf of the poet’s widow (to whom his book is dedicated “with love”), at any suggestion that Eliot treated his first wife, Vivienne, badly, or that his sexual orientation might have been open to question, and he wriggles uncomfortably with the indictment of Eliot as anti-Semitic. He has one central insight—indeed obsession—to offer: that the master-theme of Eliot’s work is that of “the buried life … the idea of a life not fully lived.”

Considering it is buried, this corpse sprouts prolifically. We hear that The Waste Land is “a series of demonstrations” of the theme, in which “the Grail story itself has a buried life” (Raine likes these heavy-breathing italics); that Eliot’s account of the subconscious tug