THE WASTE LAND T.S.

ELIOT (L7)
17/11 (A)
--- nieuwe notities zijn aangeduid met een X#

born in St. Louis, Missouri

he belonged to the 'loss' of modernity
him moving to Europe (Oxford, England) was an anti-modern move:
America represented modernity, it equaled machines, speed, technology.
To leave America was to say no to modernity in certain way. A lot of modernists went to
France, for artistic reasons because they felt that Europe was the place for art and culture.
paradox: he hated modernity, but he ended up working at the Lloyd's Bank.

(W.H. Auden was an English poet who went to America. He did the opposite thing because he
was homosexual. That was hard in England, and in America there was more room towards
homosexuals)
(There are clear links between Modernists and Fascism)
1922: holy year for modernist literature:
because in 1 year Eliot publishes TWL,
R.M. Rilke publishes Duineser Elegien
Ezra Pound: friends with Eliot, poet, he cut half of the Waste Land because it was too long
and clear.
He cut passages to make the poem denser and more difficult. Eliots version was too much
explained.
Five Parts
1 The Burial of the Dead
2 A Game of Chess
3 The Fire Sermon
4 Death by Water
5 What the Thunder Said
--- It makes vague references of the elements (fire, ether, thunder, water..)
Originally motto: The horror, the horror! (Ref: Heart of Darkness) Pound changed it.

Fertility was an important term

Vegetation myths: stories abt primitive cultures, seasons, dying of old leaves, rebirth in
Spring. Mixture of natural and cultural elements.
Fraser wrote about these myths (The Golden Bough): very influential
Decay and rebirth

The title
The notion of a waste land was mentioned for the 1st time in medieval legends. Stories abt the
holy grail.
The holy grail referred to a cup where Jesus drank from at last supper or a chalice (kelk) in
which the blood of Jesus was received after the deposition. This was a symbol of fertility.
Knights had to retrieve the blood and they had to pass the waste land.
Eliot was obsessed with dying, decay, reborn,... He wrote TWL in a mental asylum.
TWL became a metaphor for different things. One of them refers to a spiritual waste land.

Part 1 The Burial of the Dead

was the title of the book of the Anglican Church.

X1:
April associated w/ spring, renewal, rebirth, everything blossoming,
Latin aperire: to open up, beginning fertility
Why cruelest then? April pushed you to live yet again for another boring year. April is the
promise of a new beginning, but whats promised? April would be nice if the world we live
in were a nice world, but its not. So April pushed us into a world we dont like/understand.
Its counter intuitive bcs it opens up a new year into a world of false als broken promises.

Breeding lilacs: flower, purple associated with death and decay. Winter is dead land. Lilacs
refers to the death of Lincoln.
"When April with his showers sweet the drought of March has pierced into the root"
= Opening lines of Canterbury Tales, the greatest 14th century poem.
'Mixing memory and desire': a line from a 19th century poem (James Thompson)
It describes a lover who's buried alive by his lover's jealous husband.
Not so anti-historic modernist. Modernism also flaunts it's intertextual character.
Texts always live of other texts.
The emotion is expressed here. 'Spleen'= a sense of unease of being aimless. (Nl:
landerigheid)

X2:
Starnbergersee: a lake near Munich and Countess Marie Larisch's My Past. She was
daughter of a crazy pedophile king who drowned in this lake. Eliot met Marie at the lake in
1911.
He mixes language, metaphors, references,...
X3:
Smb else is talking. There's a possibility that now God is talking.
Stony rubbish = the waste land.
X4:
Biblical reference. Man after WWI, 1921 is little more than fear in a hand full of dust.
In a modernist text you cannot give your own interpretation of what it means. Meaning in a
modernist text is not stable, but always under construction.
X5:
Reference to Tarot cards
Madame Sosostris:
This Egyptian king became famous because he built irrigation canals to render the land of
the river Nile fertile.
X6:
'Those are pearls that were his eyes' : reference to Shakespeare.
Refers to the Tempest, Ferdinand who thinks his father has drowned.
X7:

On the rocks also has a different slang meaning = to go bust, to break up.
Belladonna, a beautiful lady, but poisonous but in the end on the rocks.
All the associations are here. The lady of situations: according to some linguists situations
= adultery.

Part 2 A Game of Chess notes:

Miranda (young girl in love with Ferdinand) had never seen another man in her life.
Ferdinand is infatuated with him. At one point there's a curtain and you see Miranda and
Ferdinand playing chess. (The Tempest)
The chess reference, given the prominence of The Tempest, having in mind Miranda and
Ferdinand. The entire second section is abt marriage.

It describes 3 different types of unhappy marriages. Number 3 is very prominent in this

poem.
Type 1: Line 77 - 110: Courtly Love
The woman as a commodified object in a chair.
Line 103
Jug Jug: reference to the sound of birds in a poem from the Renaissance. Reference of woman
in a golden cage.
Type 2: Line 111 - 138:
Nervous wreck, most likely Eliot's wife.
This is a scene from a married life with a woman, a wife who is very unhappy. She's suffering
from a nervous breakdown. Shes suicidal and afraid of everything.
X1:
nervous wreck,
Shakespeherian Rag is a song from 1912.
The O's are so significant:
1623 First Folio of Shakespeare, the Tempest.
In the 1st version of Hamlet, the last thing Hamlet says is O, O, O, O.
clear reference of the last sound of the dying Hamlet in the first version.
Type 3: Line 139 - 175
We're in a pub, woman is talking abt her husband after the war.
Line 160: she's taking pills, for abortion because she wasn't faithful to her man who was at that
time in the army.
Part 4 Fire Sermon
refers to Buddhism.
Line 194: reference Tempest.
Line 222: Tiresias:
Was transformed into a woman because he had seen 2 snakes copulating and hit them with a
stick.
'Throbbing between two lives': between Vivian and Russell.
Biographical explanation:

June 1915 Eliot marries Vivian. Sex life was a disaster from the start. He has hernia, sexual
inhibitions. She is neurotic, taking pills. A year later they're invited by B. Russell, a philosopher
for dinner. Russell sensed problems and he invited Vivian to become his secretary. End of July
1915, Eliot goes to America to tell them that he was going to stay in England. While Eliot is in
the US, Russell seduces Vivian. Early 1918 Eliot discovers this and it's the total disaster. All
these references in TWL are clearly abt Vivian and Russell.
Part 5 What the Thunder Said
'Drowning' has a dual meaning:
- Death by water: function of water in baptism water = force of renewal, purification
- Water also symbol for a persons descent into hell, drowning is traditionally a way to die for
unhappy lovers
Paradox of drowning is that it kills you by the life giving force of water. Water is what makes
life possible. But too much water isn't good.
Fifth section offers a possible redemption.
One of the things he suggests is expressed in Sanskrit terms.
Line 434: the ultimate modernist line.
Shantih = Hindu text, peace.
The background is the crisis of European culture after WWI. The death of civilization.