To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien.

The first half, much like the poem, is a patchwork, fragments, of Eliot's (and to an almost equal degree, Ezra Pound's) personal and cultural experiences that would ultimately contribute to what would become, to my mind, the greatest poem ever written. Those familiar with both the city and the poem know “The Wasteland” was also conceived there—in fact underwent much of its gestation under the city’s influence. The celebrated "difficulty" of both men and their work was revealed as perhaps not so difficult at all. And “a new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”.S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious.

The drought of early summer had not given up – every day in the first week of October, Hollis notes, was unseasonably hot; “the desert year”, as it came to be known.Matthew Hollis is the author of Ground Water, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Hollis sketches deftly the expatriate anxieties of the pair as they endeavour to make tradition new, navigating on the one hand the English elitism of the Woolfs and Bertrand Russell – who betrayed Eliot’s friendship in a brief, cruel affair with Vivien – and on the other American avant garde rivalries with the likes of William Carlos Williams. The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which I would never have written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps, I may be said to have had the life I needed. This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious.

In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Within, a clearly second-hand pair of brown shoes, prompted by Pound’s anxiety that Joyce, whom he liked and admired, was short of funds and in need of sturdy footwear. Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. One of the numerous illuminating anecdotes of their entwined lives sees TS Eliot deliver a parcel to James Joyce in Paris at their first ever meeting. These tensions, as he shows, were mostly played out in literary quarterlies whose circulation was almost exclusively friends and rivals.A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised and dissected poems in English literature. He reports the antisemitism that disfigured Eliot’s and Pound’s work, without minimising or mitigating it, as they did, and he is alive to the egotism that also resulted in professional missteps and personal cruelties. By Remembrance Day 1921, the first in which red poppies were sold on the pier, Eliot was sensing his poem finding its proper form, despite his ongoing despair: “On Margate Sands/ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing,” he wrote. It is because the Possum listened to Pound that The Waste Land is as it is; their collaboration, Hollis argues, didn’t merely make it better – it allowed it to become a poem rather than a collection of fragments: “They had found a way for the poem to exist within them both at the same moment, possessed by neither but possessing of both.