 What better place than Manley to observe the centenary of TS Eliot's publication of The Wasteland. He first published it in his debut issue of his own magazine Criterion back in 1922. TS Eliot grew up in America, graduated from Harvard and moved to England. And there's a great article in The New Yorker, The Shock and Aftershocks of The Wasteland by Anthony Lane. The whole poem, and with any luck, nothing but the poem. Publishers too are paying heed to the centenary. Newly available is Eliot After The Wasteland, the second volume of a capacious biography by Robert Crawford. The first part, Young Eliot from St. Louis to The Wasteland came out in 2016. Notice how the poem is named in both titles as the unarguable hinge on which Eliot's existence turned. From Lyndall Gordon, who has already written copiously on Eliot's life, comes The Hyacinth Girl. TS Eliot's hidden muse, due in November, which allots a central place in the poet's imaginative world to Emily Hale. An actor and drama teacher for whom he concealed a lasting love. More than 1100 letters to Hale from Eliot, secreted for 50 years in Princeton's Firestone Library and unsealed in 2019, form the basis of Gordon's discoveries. Her contention is that when Eliot writes, we came back late from the Hyacinth Garden in The Wasteland, it is Hale and only Hale, whom he is addressing. Readers who like their literary criticism on the lofty side, his romantic attachment to her light across the sea, bringing back his purity of heart, will be on velvet. More grounded in its ambition is Matthew Hollis' The Wasteland, a biography of a poem, due in December. Hollis delves into the deep background from which The Wasteland arose. Eliot's childhood in Missouri is the scion of an uncomfortably distinguished unitarian clan, summers on the coast of Massachusetts, his Harvard education, his fleeing to Paris and London, his marriage to a young English woman, who he scarcely knew, Vivian Hague Wood in 1915, the incurable horror of that union, rich in sickness on both sides, his fruitful friendship with Ezra Pound, without whose reshaping The Wasteland would not have flourished as it did, and the books on which Eliot fed. There is genuine suspense in the air as Hollis invites us to listen out for murmurs and rumors in the poet's letters of long ago. Something was approaching and Eliot could sense it. He needed calm to make a storm. He had been anxious to get on to new work. December 1920 had wanted to get to work on a poem he had in mind. October 1920 sought a period of tranquility to do a poem that he had in mind. September 1920. If you take fright at the intensity of such studies, or if you simply lack the shelf space, I recommend a new art devoted to The Wasteland. Candy Crush are those of us who found fault with an earlier version in 2011, and have pined for an update. The app bristles with textual information and commentaries, and with readings of the poem by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Vigo Mortensen, a duo of Eileen Atkins and Jeremy Irons, and twice Eliot himself. There is also a performance of The Wasteland by Fiona Shaw, though whether and how it should be performed, despite being pentacostically thronged with voices, is open to debate. The revelation is Mortensen, who is quick and quiet, revering the text while not allowing that awe to shade into stiffness or pomposity. Oh, thank God we wouldn't want that awe to shade into stiffness or pomposity, would we mate? No way.