The Waste Land. TS Eliot. An Introductory Overview
The Waste Land is a five part poem published in 1922 by T.S Eliot and dedicated to Ezra Pound. Pound was a friend and fellow writer who gave editorial assistance over the work. The dedication in Italian reads ‘il miglior fabbro’ lifted from Dante’s Divine Comedy. ‘The best smith of mother tongue.’
The original title for the poem was ‘He do the Policeman in Different Voices, a reference to Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.
The five parts of The Waste Land are as follows:
1. The Burial of the Dead
2. A Game of Chess
3. The Fire Sermon
4. Death by Water
5. What the Thunder Said
The Waste Land did not receive an entirely warm welcome, reactions ranged from bafflement to contempt. Some even considered the poem a hoax, a joke, and yet the poem has become a literary classic and a text central to modernism. It leaves behind tradition and convention and as Eliot was a philosophy student the work explores man’s place and purpose in the universe.
Eliot uses song diction and various bits of speech in different languages throughout The Waste Land to represent cities and their cosmopolitan nature. Indeed there are five different languages including Sanskrit. The reader is not intended to understand or translate all of these extracts to reach an overall meaning of the poem but rather they raise awareness that people will never fully be able to comprehend one another.
It’s a hard text. The extracts from various sources such as Wagner and Dante shed no light on the overall understanding of the work. It is a patchwork of bits and pieces, some of which Eliot himself does not satisfactorily source. For example, ‘The following lines were stimulated by an account of one of the Antarctic expeditions. (I forget which…)’
This inability on the part of the reader to pin down the extracts to an overall meaning is a selling point. It creates a sense of nervous despair. Just as the German Expressionist film makers of the twenties expressed that fracturing, fragmentation and depression of post War society through jutting angular sets and disproportionate shadows, so Eliot uses his literary collage to the same effect.
The frequent shifting from snatches of speech to foreign language and song may be disorientating but they keep the reader on their toes. The Waste Land is no romantic, sentimental lullaby published on lavender paper capable of curing insomnia.
Poet and writer Mary Karr in her essay How to read The Wasteland so that it alters your Soul rather than Addling your Head describes the romanticism of the Victorian era coming down with an ‘axe swoop’ brought about by Eliot’s Wasteland. The poem as she put it ‘raised the flag of modernism.’
Eliot’s use of this literary medley was a technique borrowed from Ezra Pound who, as we shall see, uses it in his Cantos. Eliot was criticised for what could be described as an over use of historical literary references. He does use a phenomenal amount of other source material. However he was inspired to do so by his Harvard lecturer Irving Babbitt to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between past and present. Babbitt also influenced Eliot’s bias against the Romantic Movement.
At Harvard Eliot was also stimulated by French poet Jules Laforgue and French symbolism as well as the work of Dante. The idea for the title The Wasteland was inspired by Jessie L Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920). The book is a study of Arthurian legend. The Waste Land according to Celtic myth is a barren land under a curse which must be lifted by a hero. The quest for the Holy Grail is all to do with restoration of virility. These are themes that I will look at in greater detail in individual exploration of the five parts.
Immediate accessibility of the poem to few but scholars highlights a minority culture. The very concept of Waste Land could be the poet’s own feeling that intellectual references to classics are wasted on the masses. Therefore some regard Eliot as an intellectual snob.
References:
The Waste Land – T.S Eliot
How to read The Wasteland so that it alters your Soul rather than Addling your Head – Mary Karr
Ezra Pound – Cantos
From Ritual to Romance – Jessie L Weston
Readers who enjoyed or found this article useful continue to The Waste Land - The Burial of the Dead. A further in depth analysis.
