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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

editor to The Spectator, and this week my guest is the writer and publisher Matthew Hollis,

whose new book is The Wasteland,

A Biography of a Poem, just catching the last gasp of Eliot's centenary year for that great breakthrough poem. Now, Matthew, what does it mean to write a biography of a poem? I mean, there's a lot of material

in here which is about the circumstances of the poem's arrival, isn't it? Well, I think there is

perhaps a conventional reading or understanding of the act between a poet and a poem, that a poem is

received by the poet. And Keats used to say that

if a poem does not come as easily as leaves from a tree, it better have not come at all,

in the idea that there was a direct muse and inspiration, and out the poem came. But I think for a lot

of poets, that's not the case. I mean, lucky Keats, for many of us, it's like pulling teeth using

our feet.

And I think one of the unusual things about the wasteland in particular was that here was an

occasion where there were two minds at work. And although the poem has an author, and it certainly

has an editor too, there was a sense in which the poem was possessed by two different people

and two different bodies and two different minds at the same time

and they had the same thought about what this poem should be

and that a convergence took place.

You're talking about Elliot and Pound, presumably.

I am talking about Elliot and Pound

and particularly the idea that a poem is somehow outside of the poet

as well as within in the experience that a poem is somehow outside of the poet as well as within

...