T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” to quote the description in Robert Crawford’s mesmerizing new book, was — and is — a poem of “ruin, brokenness, pain and wastage,” but these same words could easily characterize its author’s disastrous marriage. In 1915 Eliot proposed to Vivien Haigh-Wood, partly out of desire for sexual experience, which he was too shy to seek in other ways. Following “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract,” the young poet found himself shackled to a needy, fragile woman he grew to dislike, then pity and finally loathe. He would turn for love and sympathetic understanding elsewhere.