home of the free because of the brave tattoo

I was reminded of those heady, free-range reading days recently by a book that provided exactly the kind of context I could have used back then: Robert Crawford’s “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land,’” the second part of his two-volume biography, which draws on a trove of new documents and traces Eliot’s fascinating progression as a poet and a person. So while I cherish my memories of reading “The Waste Land” on city buses and park benches in 1990s San Francisco, I knew even while I was reading it that the main thing I would come away with was a feel for its rhythm and mood while galloping right over the context of Eliot’s life and times that might have cracked it wider open for me. There’s a certain unhindered joy in reading for yourself instead of for a syllabus, but there’s also the considerable drawback - heightened in those pre-internet days - that you don’t have a professor standing by to explain the tricky bits to you. I was a French major in college, not an English major, and so I spent a lot of my early 20s catching up on the kind of classics that my friends had read in school: Austen, Dickens, Hemingway, Ellison.

Home of the free because of the brave tattoo