100 years since poetry changed for ever with ‘The Waste Land’ immorality is commonplace.

It was written in the Roaring

T.S. Eliot began his career as a nihilist and ended it as a Twenties, but it has a very contemporary ring. What is the woke
Christian. Michael Cook movement other than a repudiation of the Western canon?
Read it for yourself. Better still, listen to Alec Guinness read it.
2022. A deadly pandemic. War in Ethiopia. Civil war in Notwithstanding its pessimism, it is musical and endlessly
Myanmar. Looming war in Ukraine. Chaos in American politics, fascinating.
in British politics. Woke lunacy. A million Uyghurs interned in Despite the dismal themes and supercilious erudition in “The
China. Sectarian violence in India. Waste Land” and in his other early poems, Eliot was a searcher
after truth. You can see that he senses that there must be
Was there ever a worse year? something else, something that will slake a thirst for happiness
and meaning:
There are quite a few contenders, but one of them surely is
1922. One hundred years ago, the future looked grim. The If there were the sound of water only
world had just recovered from the First World War, in which 40 Not the cicada
million people died. Another 40 million or so died in the Great And dry grass singing
Influenza Epidemic. The Bolsheviks were consolidating their But sound of water over a rock
rule in Russia after a civil war in which 10 million died. Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Americans were suffering under Prohibition. Australia had just Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
invented Vegemite. Yes, 1922 was worse. But there is no water

Articulating the dread and despair of the 1920s was a poem
aptly named “The Waste Land”. It was published in 1922 by T.S.
Eliot, a 34-year-old American — although he found Britain so
congenial that he spent most of his adult life there and posed
as a middle-class Englishman with a bowler hat and rolled-up
brolly.
Analysis of “The Waste Land” would fill a library; commentary
on his other poetry, plays, and literary criticism, plus endless
biographies, would fill several libraries. In 1922 “The Waste
Land” was exhilaratingly modern and since then, say some
critics, nothing more modern has been written. In 1948 Eliot
won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
After your first reading of “The Waste Land” you may feel that it
is almost unbearably bleak. It opens with an epigraph in Latin
and Greek from a Latin classic, The Satyricon, written in the first
century AD: “I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae
hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: ‘Sibyl, what
do you want?’ she answered: ‘I want to die.’”
And that is just the beginning. The vignettes of characters
ancient and modern are mostly about death and desolation.
The citation from an obscure ancient text is characteristic of
Eliot’s technique in “The Waste Land”. He quotes or
paraphrases St Augustine, Elizabethan poetry, Sanskrit poetry,
19th century French poetry, a guide to North American birds,
German opera, Dante, Antarctic explorers, an Australian pub
song, and I’ve left out a lot. It’s a sort of jumble sale of Western
culture.
The 433-line poem creates an overwhelming sense of moral,
psychological, cultural, and intellectual chaos with its rapid
succession of flickering images, deftly woven together in words
of memorable music. “These fragments I have shored against
my ruins,” is one of the poem’s most often quoted lines.
It depicts a culture which is falling apart and no longer
understands where it has come from or where it is going, where
nothing is admirable or even intelligible, where sexual
These are not the most-quoted lines from “The Waste Land”,
but they anticipate a radical change in Eliot’s later poetry. In
1927 he converted from nominal Unitarianism (an American
denomination whose creed is the fatherhood of God, the
brotherhood of man and the neighbourhood of Boston) to
Anglo-Catholicism. It was an astonishing transition to traditional
Christianity, which he celebrated in a beautiful and enigmatic
poem, “Ash-Wednesday”. His new-found faith must have
baffled his friends.
Thereafter he wrote a series of deeply Christian poems. “Four
Quartets”, the most important of them, must be numbered
amongst the greatest religious poetry in the English language.
He also wrote several plays, of which the best-known is Murder
in the Cathedral, about the assassination of Archbishop Thomas
Becket by knights of Henry II in 1170.
He became a critic of an increasingly irreligious British society
and published a collection of his lectures as The Idea of a
Christian Society in 1939. His political philosophy, while perhaps
naïve, was a testimony to the intellectual depth of his
conversion. He wrote:
As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and
ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the
eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social
organisation which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore
some essential aspect of reality … If you will not have God (and
He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or
Stalin.
What I am not suggesting is that Eliot was a saint (unlikely) or a
touchstone for Christian orthodoxy. He was simply a poet –
albeit the greatest poet in English of the 20th century — who
allowed his work to be shaped by Christian doctrine and culture
rather than by the bleak nihilism of his surroundings.
What I am suggesting is that Eliot’s career has a message for us.
It shows that 2022 need not mark the end of Christian influence
upon our culture because of woke insanities, the cancel culture
movement and the steady erosion of faith. 2022 could be
another 1922, the year in which Thomas Stearns Eliot began to
gather together the scattered fragments of his Christian
heritage.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
Faber celebrates the centenary of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Originally published in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was those readers most familiar with the work, while the new audio
the most revolutionary poem of its time, offering a devastating editions will be sure to bring a fresh audience to this most
vision of modern civilisation. enduring masterpiece, which lies at the radical heart of Faber’s
story.’
To mark the centenary in 2022, Faber is delighted to announce
new publishing and an exciting work of non-fiction by award- Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He
winning biographer and Faber Poetry Editor, Matthew Hollis. settled in England in 1915 and published his first book of poems
in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot
In this riveting account, The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound died in 1965.
and the Making of a Masterpiece (September 2022), Matthew
Hollis reconstructs the genesis of the poem and brings its times Matthew Hollis is a poet and biographer. Now All Roads Lead to
vividly to life. He tells the story of the cultural and personal France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber, 2011; Norton,
trauma that forged the poem through the interleaved lives of 2012) won the Costa Biography Award and was Sunday Times
its protagonists – of Ezra Pound, who edited it, of Vivien Eliot, Biography of the Year.
who endured it, and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private
torment is woven into the fabric of the work. The result is an Edoardo Ballerini has won the US Audio Publishers Association’s
engrossing story of lives passing in opposing directions: Eliot’s Best Male Narrator ‘Audie’ Award twice and is the only narrator
into redemptive stardom, Vivien’s into isolated despair, to be profiled by the New York Times Magazine, which called
Pound’s into unforgiving darkness. him ‘A master in his field . . . at the forefront of a new kind of
celebrity.’ He is also a frequent narrator of ‘Sunday Reads’ for
In association with the T. S. Eliot Foundation, Faber has The Daily, the New York Times’s podcast, reaching audiences of
commissioned a new recording of T. S. Eliot’s landmark poem, over two million listeners, and of ‘Sleep Stories’ for the popular
narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, one of the finest readers of Calm app, which has over fifty million downloads.
literature alive today. …………………………………………………………………………………………..
The Waste Land at 100: Seeing it Freshly, Making it Ours
Poems in this recording also include ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’, Few great poems are as hard to teach as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
‘The Hollow Men’, ‘Journey of the Magi’ and ‘Animula’. The Land, not only because the text itself is so elusive (and allusive),
audiobook will be published on 4 January 2022 to mark the but also because it comes to us encrusted by a hundred years
beginning of the centenary year and to coincide with the of commentary. With explanations of the poem no more than a
anniversary of Eliot’s death. click away, what reading strategies can we use to help our
students encounter the poem freshly? How can we put their
Clare Reihill, of the T. S. Eliot Foundation, said: puzzlement to use, honoring their frustration—their desire to
‘Edoardo Ballerini is widely regarded as the brightest star of the know “what it all means”—without substituting pre-fab
audiobook era, one of the finest readers of literature alive analyses for the active inquiry and personal journey that the
today. He is a performer whose name alone can draw poem can offer? (To paraphrase another Eliot poem, how do
audiences to an audiobook – “the Vladimir Horowitz of . . . we keep them from “having the meaning but missing the
audiobooks”, as the New York Times has called him. The son of experience”?) What do we most need to know, as teachers, in
the poet Luigi Ballerini, he has recorded, to great acclaim, order to teach this poem—and what might we need to forget in
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle order to see it freshly ourselves? This seminar will explore ways
and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, among many others. We are to teach The Waste Land both quickly and slowly, with and
thrilled to have him record The Waste Land to mark this without its historical and biographical contexts, while giving
landmark poem’s centenary.’ teachers the opportunity to share their own favorite
approaches, resources, and classroom practices.
In addition, to celebrate fifty years of the facsimile, Faber will …………………………………………………………………
publish a new edition of The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Ambition and despair: the centenary of TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste
Transcript of the Original Drafts (3 February 2022), in which Land’
Eliot’s own pages of typescript and manuscript are published in
startling full colour for the first time. Meticulously edited by the One hundred years ago this month, TS Eliot was in the final
poet’s widow, Valerie Eliot, this new edition is a reissue, with stage of composing his masterpiece, The Waste Land, whose
corrections, of the text of the 1980 reprint, and includes an publication centenary we celebrate next year. The 433-line
appendix of original materials not previously made available. poem is one of those craggy, difficult monuments of “high
modernism”, as the period was once grandly termed. However,
Alex Bowler, Faber Publisher, said: unlike the forbidding lengths of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra
Pound’s Cantos, or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Eliot’s
‘2022 will be a year of celebration, led by Matthew Hollis’s poem can be swallowed whole in about 25 minutes. When I
surpassing “biography” of the poem. The perfect match of introduce The Waste Landto undergraduates, I soft-pedal its
author and subject, it will reilluminate the poem, shedding new difficulties by suggesting they not bother looking up allusions or
light on what we think we know of The Waste Land and its googling help, and I ask them simply to listen to a professional
making. Likewise, the revised colour facsimile edition will actor or poet reading the poem on YouTube. Hearing the music
provide a depth of new information and understanding for of the poem without at first worrying about its obscure
meanings is the fastest way to get hooked on the haunting narrative, and it seems to be a series of vignettes and
weirdness of the thing. (I was puzzled when my students observations, told, cried or whispered by different voices. Even
glommed on to a recording by Alec Guiness. Apparently Star more confusingly, these voices are thrown together with all the
Wars fans, their fall into The Waste Land was precipitated by seams showing, with no attempt to smooth out transitions or to
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s delivery.) locate the reader in a recognisable context. Overheard snatches
of song and fragments from other literary works float in and out
The Waste Land contains moments of tender beauty, raunchy of the texture.
humour and glimpses of the transcendent, but the poem is
primarily known for its bleak outlook, as a document of In the midst of writing the poem – struggling to find a form to
personal and cultural crises. Circa 1919-21, the crises from express instability – Eliot’s beloved mother, brother and sister
which European culture was suffering are too many to list. But came from America for their first visit to London in the summer
they include economic uncertainty and political redistricting in of 1921. Six years previously, on a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship
the aftermath of devastating war, mass slaughter and at Oxford, Eliot had eloped with Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom
pandemic; the ascendancy of Darwinism, psychology and he had just met, enabling him to burn his bridges in America.
science, with an attendant loss of religious certainty; upheavals His parents had disapproved of his sudden marriage to
in gender roles and sexual identity; and increasing urbanisation Vivienne, whom they had never met: a wide ocean and a long
and mechanisation. In the first decades of the 20th century, it war had separated son from family. Meanwhile, Eliot’s father
was a cause of great concern that modern life had become fast, had died in 1919, further delaying his family’s visit to London.
brutal and alienating. In the agonies of The Waste Land, its first And so, in the summer of 1921, finally able to host his family,
readers came to recognise their own disillusion. Gertrude Stein Eliot spent three months of their visit desperately trying to hide
called these postwar castaways the “lost generation”. his wife’s illnesses and instability from them. As might be
imagined, Vivienne did not make a good impression. Less adept
The peculiarly sensitive antennae that enabled Eliot to register at emotional restraint than the New England Eliots, she lost
his culture’s anxieties had been fine-tuned by his own control in spectacular fashion as they said goodbyes at the ship.
sufferings. His personal problems are also too many to list, but (Vivienne wrote to Eliot’s brother Henry, in a mixture of shame
they touched on the spiritual, marital, sexual, psychological and and apology: “Now I want you to tell me something truly. You
vocational. In the domestic sphere, Eliot was trapped in a are not to lie to me. Did your mother and sister show, think, say
loveless, co-dependent marriage to a mentally unstable woman or intimate that I behaved like ‘no lady,’ and just like a wild
for whom he felt responsible. At work, he laboured away at animal when [we] saw you off? I was perfectly stunned on that
Lloyds Bank in an underground office, ruining his health with occasion.”) After his family left, Eliot suffered a serious
overwork and undersleep to make time for his writing. Unable breakdown. Lloyds granted him leave, and Eliot decamped to
to quit the bank because of his wife’s medical bills, he had to Margate for a few weeks (“Margate Sands” show up in the
postpone his dream of being a full-time writer. In his personal poem). By the end of 1921, he was seeking treatment from a
life, the bohemian artists of Bloomsbury provided some specialist in a Swiss sanitarium, where he finished the final
cherished friendships but no models for the kind of artist or section of the poem. On his way to and from Lausanne, Eliot
man Eliot wanted to be. stopped in Paris to meet with Ezra Pound, who took the
sprawling manuscript in hand and slashed it into publishable
His spiritual life was inchoate. He had turned away from his form, earning Eliot’s dedicatory epigraph to the poem: “For
family’s anaemic Unitarianism with distaste, and he had found Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro” (the better maker).
nothing to replace it. The Boston version of Unitarianism which
he had inherited possessed little sense of the spiritual, It may seem remarkable that anyone could compose a major
consisting mainly of principles of decorum. (After his conversion work in the midst of such external chaos and internal pain. But
to Christianity in 1927, Eliot complained that the Unitarianism poetry spoke to something deep and mysterious in Eliot. The
of his youth had only taught him socially what was done or not rhythmic, incantatory aspect of poetry – rather than the sober
done, rather than what was good or evil.) And though he had clarity of prose – was no doubt the only way he could have
written an excellent doctoral dissertation in philosophy, he expressed the depths of his anguish. What is more remarkable
never defended it, abandoning his graduate work at Harvard is that while the poem expressed breakdown, uncertainty and
University. despair, its author kept his head for business and his ambition
to conquer the literary marketplace.
His inquiries into the western philosophical tradition had
offered him no lasting values or spiritual promise on which to By January of 1922, the poem was close to the form it would
hang a life. Likewise, his coursework in eastern religions had take upon publication, and Eliot had settled on its final title, The
intrigued him, but they were ultimately intellectual exercises, Waste Land. If the poem had appeared shortly thereafter in
consisting of books and translations but shorn of community, print, it might not have become so famous. Ezra Pound had
practice and liturgy. Nothing, it seemed, could show him a way wanted the poem to appear in the American journal The Dial,
forward. Or out. Or up. With a capacious intellect and a restless where Pound, as foreign adviser, was collecting other authors
spirit, Eliot looked in all directions. who represented the modernist movement. Although the terms
of the original offer ($150) were slightly more generous than
It was this state of mind from which The Waste Land sprang. the normal fee scale, Eliot mistakenly thought he was being
The formal properties of the poem dramatised a radical cheated. Pound kept reiterating that The Waste Land was the
uncertainty. The poem lacks a single narrator or a single next Ulysses, and Eliot was firmly convinced of the market
worth of his poem. By holding out for more, Eliot was signalling
not only the monetary value of the poem but its status as a
literary monument. He was in a tight place, however, because
he was beholden to Pound’s preference for placing it in The
Dial. By shopping the poem around in the interim to such
magazines as Vanity Fair, Pound and Eliot were not honestly
seeking a different venue but putting pressure on The Dial. For
several months, there followed complex and rancorous
negotiations, the outcome of which was that the editors of The
Dial agreed to award its substantial December prize of $2,000
for The Waste Land as a way of getting around the original offer
tied to a fee scale, which Eliot would not accept. (The critic
Lawrence Rainey has told this story in close detail, and he notes
the astonishing fact that the editors of The Dial were so worried
about missing out on the Next Big Thing that they offered the
prize before they had even read the poem.) The chatter about
these negotiations and the prestige of the award meant that
The Waste Land was primed for a splashy premiere.
It came out in the UK in October 1922 in the inaugural issue of
The Criterion, Eliot’s new literary quarterly. (That this journal
was conceived, funded and launched in this same time period is
yet another measure of Eliot’s ferocious ambition.) In America,
the poem appeared in the November issue of The Dial, along
with the announcement of its award. Soon, even the popular
press took notice, with a number of publications denouncing
the bewildering poem as a hoax. But there’s no such thing as
bad press… The Waste Land – an avant-garde poem written for
a coterie audience – had escaped its tiny bubble, making
international headlines and turning Eliot into a household
name. Readers clamoured for copies, bumping the sales of the
journals in which it appeared and of its later book form to
which some notes were appended, to make the book seem less
like a pamphlet. It was a welcome, if not entirely surprising
development for its author, who understood the volatile winds
of the literary marketplace and who trimmed his sails to
capture its energies. The Waste Land itself, a bleak and
haunting lament, reflects aspects of Eliot’s terrible doubts and
sufferings. But its publication history tells a different story of its
author’s canny business sense and vaunting literary ambition.
Jayme Stayer, SJ, is an associate professor at Loyola University
Chicago
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Reading ‘The Waste Land’ 100 years on
Jacky Chan considers the enduring relevance of 'The Waste
Land' 100 years since its publication.
By Jacky Chan -3rd February 2022156
As the centenary of perhaps the two towering works of literary
modernism, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s
Ulysses, 2022 appears a natural time to reflect on the present
day significance of these texts. Such an impulse can only be
furthered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused many
to use literary works as a means of processing, alleviating, or
escaping from present reality.
Given this connection, The Waste Land is the perfect work for
our times. Fragmented into many voices with bits and pieces of
allusion, the poem is clichédly read as dramatising the condition
of post-WW1 Europe. Eliot’s work begins by painting a world
with only “a little life”: even the poem’s form itself is barely
hanging on, with the lines held together by faint half-rhymes.
As The Waste Land progresses, however, the possibility of
regeneration and redemption becomes stronger and stronger.
A “damp gust” is “bringing rain” to the “arid plain”, which is
“behind me”; there is the hope that the land will be set “in
order”. Reading The Waste Land in 2022 thus seems to offer
not just consolation and peace of mind, but also give voice to
the present urge to move forward and put the traumatic past
behind us.
Do we need, though, to desperately move on whatever the
cost? As I write, the frankly bullish ‘live with the virus’ ideology
that is now governing the UK is causing a sense of profound
unease, prompting me to turn back to The Waste Land. For the
poem seems to me, in fact, to actually revolt against simplistic
trajectories of hope and progress. Right from the beginning, the
poem seems to suggest that suffering originates from
unfounded hope. It is not entirely clear why “April is the
cruellest month” because memory is mixed with desire and
“dull roots” are stirred by spring rain: I think what Eliot is
getting at, is that there is pain in trying to rejuvenate what is
already dead (the dull roots), in trying to instil a desire for the
future when past memories and traumas have not been fully
processed. You can’t just mindlessly charge ahead.
As someone who doesn’t believe reasonable precautions
(mask-wearing, self-isolating) should be thrown into the wind
just for normalcy’s sake (whose normal, anyways?), reading The
Waste Land and its thwarting of hope thus becomes strangely
comforting. Think the rain at the end of the poem signals
rebirth? Well, water actually seems quite deadly. The reader is
told to ‘Fear death by water’, and when the veteran in the
poem’s second section remembers his fallen comrade through
an excerpt of verse from Shakespeare’s Tempest – “Those are
the pearls that were his eyes” – water suddenly becomes much
closer to the “green sea” of wartime poison gas that Wilfred
Owen famously described in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Does the
fragmented poem ultimately cohere? Actually, we are told that
the fragments are shored against rather than shore up the
ruins; the tiny prepositional change crumbles hopefulness into
limp helplessness. It is as if Eliot sets up the possibility of a
redemption arc only to then deconstruct it from within the
poem, reminding the reader that a much more nuanced post-
crisis view is necessary. Living in the wake of any crisis, whether
WW1 or the COVID-19 pandemic, does not mean forgetting the
crisis altogether. Instead, The Waste Land reminds us, it’s much
more about giving ourselves space to recollect, reflect, and
recuperate, to emerge out of the crisis on our own terms. If
Eliot’s poem is in many ways resistant to abrasive discourses of
hope and progress, then, is it finally also against the very idea
of centennialism? As Harris Feinsod puts it, centenaries are
“empty occasions of calendrical time impos[ing] their false
coherence on us”. Feinsod’s argument is sound: endlessly
parading how applicable The Waste Land is to our modern day
living feels suspiciously like stirring dull roots with spring rain,
to use the poem’s own image. But I also don’t think there’s
necessarily anything bad about using centenaries as motivation
to revisit old works, and 2022 just happens to be a great year in
which to read The Waste Land. For me, the experience of
reading the poem will certainly serve to guide me as I navigate
the uncertain days ahead, and I hope it will be the same for There are several lines in the poem that resonate today, one
you. hundred years later. The Waste land, published in 1922, never
………………………………………………………………………… made more sense than in times of another pandemic.
In his notes to his masterpiece "The Waste Land", poet T.S. Eliot National Herald 31 May 2020 Joy Bhattacharya
says that Frazer's The Golden Bough is an important source for
understanding the poem. In what way, and is the poem My acquaintance with TS Eliot’s poetry was perfunctory. A
inaccessible otherwise? student of Economics in college and with little interest in poetry
at the time, I ignored his works as much as was possible. It
Frazer's The Golden Bough is a cult book in anthropology. It wasn’t possible to avoid it entirely because English was one of
traces the origin of our current-day religion to ancient oriental the papers and a part of the poem was prescribed.
fertility rites. Eliot's book drew heavily upon Frazer's for the
central theme. In the middle of a major nervous breakdown, I didn’t understand the poem and though the striking imagery
Eliot wrote the poem - possibly depicting the rot in his of April as the cruellest month stayed in mind, I felt no incentive
contemporary society. The rot he represented by a land gone to explore it further till the lockdown forced me to go back to it.
barren after its king suffers a magical wound and is rendered Intrigued, I felt compelled to explore the context and learnt
impotent. Pretty bleak in tone through its entire length, the that Eliot wrote it in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu and the
poem does however turn optimistic toward the end. first world war between 1918 and 1920. The poem was first
published in 1922.
Other than Frazer, another book that influenced Eliot's
presentation of the poem was Jessie Weston's book, called There are several lines in the poem that resonate today, one
From Ritual to Romance, which was again influenced by Frazer's hundred years later. The title The Waste land never made more
thoughts. Frazer's legend of the Holy Grail influenced Weston's sense than in these times of another pandemic. I personally
book, as much as the rest of the accompanying symbols: the have read the following lines, among several others, over and
Fisher King, who sits fishing on a lake, his wound making his over again.
land infertile, the Grail, possibly the relic from the crucifixion of
Christ. Percival, a knight from Arthur's court, comes to the • He who was living is now dead
Fisher King's castle, heals his wound, and restores his land to
order. In Eliot's The Waste Land, the Fisher King almost We who were living are now dying
occupies center stage and ties the central theme of a sacred
sacrifice of a king, with an annual renewal of life that governed With a little patience
ancient religion.
• Unreal City
Right at the beginning Eliot mentions "Lilacs out of the dead
land, mixing/Memory and desire," and if you do not understand A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
the allusion to the ancient cult of vegetation rites, you are left
wondering why such an odd reference. Also in lines like: I had not thought death had undone so many

"While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him."
Eliot is referring to the myth of Osiris and Isis, where Osiris is
killed by his brother. But Isis puts him back together again, and
he is reborn, thus making Osiris the symbol of renewal of life.
Etymologically the Egyptian word 'Osiris' relates to the Syrian
'Adonis', both versions of vegetation deity, whose annual
renewal was celebrated by the community women.
Also note the lines:
"I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?"
If you do not have Frazer's themes handy or at least look up
Weston's book, you will make little sense of the allusions Eliot is
making here. Not only Eliot, Frazer's book has had its impact on
major modernist writers including, Yeats, Hemingway, Joyce,
Lawrence and Pound. Why don't you look it up here: Frazer, Sir
James George. 1922. The Golden Bough
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Rediscovering ‘The Waste Land’, a century after Eliot caught the
Spanish Flu
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
I read commentaries to understand what Eliot could have
meant by describing April, the beginning of spring in most of
the western hemisphere, as the cruellest month; and realised
for the first time that he was referring to hope and
disappointment. Hope could hurt and the advent of spring
could hurt by not getting realised.
T. S. Eliot and his wife, Vivien caught the virus in December
1918. Eliot’s attack was comparatively mild, though in a letter
to his mother on December 8, 1918, he writes that it left him
“so very weak afterwards.” Vivien then caught it and was much
sicker; the virus, Eliot wrote, “affected her nerves so that she
can hardly sleep at all.”
In Ireland yet another poet W. B. Yeats had watched helplessly
as his pregnant wife, George, struggled to fight off the virus at
their rented house in Dublin. Outside, the pandemic was
sweeping through the city. The countryside where Yeats
thought of taking her offered no escape, already overrun with
funerals and bodies. Before it was over, the flu would infect
between 600,000 and 800,000 people in Ireland.
Globally, the pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million
people, and the United States suffered more deaths in the
pandemic than in World War I, World War II, and the conflicts
in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq—combined. In Britain,
while more died in World War I, a third of the population, or
ten million people, caught the flu, and at least 228,000 died.
The pandemic changed public life—closing schools, churches,
and businesses and filling the hospitals as the coronavirus is
doing now.
An interesting nugget I picked up is that like many other people
during the pandemic, Virginia Woolf initially treated the
outbreak as a side note to the larger story of the war. In July
1918, as the first wave struck, she recorded in her diary that
influenza “rages all over the place” and indeed “has come next
door” to infect their neighbour. But she did not seem unduly
alarmed. The next week, she reported “a funeral next door;
dead of influenza”.
………………………………………………………………………………………
Adapting The Waste Land for the stage, 100 years after its
literary debut
Univ. of Victoria; by John Threlfall | Feb 10, 2022
Since its publication in 1922, T.S. Eliot’s landmark modernist
poem The Waste Land has never ceased to be controversial.
Inspired by the physical and emotional devastation of both the
First World War and the global influenza pandemic, Eliot’s 433-
line poem has spawned countless courses, studies, reviews and
books. But, over the course of its 100-year life, The Waste Land
has rarely been adapted for the stage—and usually only for solo
performers.
Now, theatre professor Conrad Alexandrowicz has taken on the
somewhat daunting task of directing and choreographing his
own adaptation for a February 17-26 full-cast run at the
Phoenix Theatre.
“This is not a play, and it completely ruptures all the rules of
drama,” explains Alexandrowicz. “The attention of the poetic
voice is constantly changing . . . but I wanted to create
continuity within the piece, so I’ve rearranged the text to create
dialogue—which was really an amazing thing to do, as it works
brilliantly and reveals meanings in an entirely different way. So
yes, every single line he wrote will be spoken—sometimes more
than once—but not necessarily in the order [he wrote them].”
He pauses and laughs. “I’m sure T.S. Eliot would really hate
that.”
An unconventional adaptation
No stranger to stirring strong emotions in his audiences,
Alexandrowicz is a physical-theatre maker who specializes in
the creation of interdisciplinary performances which address
subjects central to the human journey: issues of relationship,
gender and power, and the nature of the performance event
itself.
Given that The Waste Land has been described as “the most
revolutionary poem of its time” and still has the ability to spark
controversy a century after its publication, Alexandrowicz’s
unconventional adaptation seems ideally suited to such
groundbreaking source material.
“We’ve never done this kind of abstract physical theatre at the
Phoenix, so I’m really interested to see what people will think
of this adaptation,” he says.
Working with a cast of 13 students plus four designers,
Alexandrowicz is taking his creative cues from the poem itself.
“In one scene, for example, Eliot quotes a song called ‘The
Shakespearean Rag’—so we have a singer appear and the rest
of the cast comes running on and suddenly we’re in a musical—
then all that disappears and we go back to scene that was
interrupted. I’m trying to embody and reveal as much as
possible given the shifts within the text.”
Exploring a queer subtext
Another aspect of this adaptation Eliot would likely hate is the
foregrounding of the poem’s homosexual subtext, which offers
a marked contrast to the poet’s famously disastrous first
marriage. While studying in Paris as a young man, Eliot shared a
rooming house with Jean Verdenal, a medical student who then
died during WWI.
“There is very significant and convincing evidence that he was
very much in love with this man,” says Alexandrowicz, whose
first book was Acting Queer: Gender Dissidence and the
Subversion of Realism. “There are a lot of tensions in the text
I’m trying to reveal. But, as a gay man, I really want to bring this
relationship to the forefront and pull it out as a narrative thread
people can follow.”
While he appreciates this adaptation may not satisfy Eliot
purists, Alexandrowicz insists that—much like The Waste Land
itself—there’s meaning beyond what appears on the page.
“If you’re really exploring something, you’re going to create
strong feelings in response to it,” he concludes. “I think, in
these times of crisis, we should be trying to create vital drama.”
…………………………………………………………………………………………
T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922.
The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately
recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one
of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as
crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this
collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred
years after its original publication. At this centenary moment,
the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its
sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's
legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an
international team of writers from the UK, North America, and
India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek
to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others
resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem,
and present new understandings of the process of its
development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the
page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the
poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and The Waste Land is crowded with influences, from Conrad,
about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker, the
poetries across the first century of its existence. An classics Eliot read in his youth. But Eliot’s sources are also vast,
Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and ranging from the Bible to Dante’s Divine Comedy, from
the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the Shakespeare to French symbolists, from Homer’s Odyssey to
nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh Hindu sacred text The Upanishads.
eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on.
………………………………………………………………………………………………. A perfect orchestra
The Waste Land | A influences constellation in an ode to Eliot thought decay and fragmentation are the keywords of
desolation present times. To highlight these topics, he used his cultural
references inserting them into scenes of ordinary modern life.
1979 was the years of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s
film portrayal of the different psychological reactions of man to In The Burial of the Dead, for example, a crowd of anonymous
the controlled chaos of war. In this movie the elusive renegade workers crosses London Bridge on their way to their office. A
special forces, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz reads lines from the image fuses with another from Dante’s Inferno, where the souls
poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot. Seated in his cave headquarters of the damned crowd together on the riverbank of Acheron,
in Cambodia, he recites the opening lines from The Hollow waiting for their journey to hell. Eliot’s alarm concerns the
Men, Eliot’s 1925 poem, influenced by Joseph Conrad’s 1899 indifference and the paralysis with which people treat their
novel, Heart of Darkness. But during the movie, there are own lives. These juxtapositions bring to the surface the
frequent citations to The Love Song of Alfred J.Prufrock (1915) meanings that lie invisibly in a world that seems to have
and one of Eliot’s masterpieces, published in 1922. The Waste forgotten them.
Land.
The poem appears as an orchestra of clustering voices, quotes
Eliot is regarded as one of the leading poets of his time: author and is written in three languages, mainly English, but with
of complex, long, multiply-referential works of Modernist French and German passages too.
Poetry that read as entrancingly-labyrinthine historical, moral,
and philosophical critiques of the early 20th-century. And also, In this cultural labyrinth, he uses different registers of speech,
after near one hundred years, The Waste Land can stand out for frequently changing his voice from highly rhetorical to
its structural complexity, its breadth of learning, influences, and colloquial. It contains some of the most widely-regarded, and
magical use of words. quoted lines of twentieth-century poetry:

A modern Arthurian tale And I will show you something different from either
Four hundred and thirty-four lines long, The Waste Land Your shadow at morning striding behind you
includes five sections: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, and What the Thunder Said. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
In an inscription itself derived from Dante, the poem is
dedicated to Ezra Pound. The different sections paint a poetic
In 1921, when writing this poem, Eliot wrote in The Dial – a
portrait of a world civilization in the aftermath of the horrors of
literary magazine publishing modernist writing – about Le Sacre
World War I, while Eliot’s symbolic framework is also based on
du Printemps, a ballet with music by the Russian composer Igor
Arthurian tales and the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher
Stravinsky. Eliot was impressed by how Stravinsky managed to
King. He read them in two monumental essays: The Golden take the barbarian noises of present times, such as the rumble
Bough by James Frazer (1915)and From Ritual to Romance by of the underground, the clatter of iron and steel, and turn it
Jessie L. Weston (1920). into a melody. Many critics noticed how this kind of method
influenced Eliot’s composition.
April is the cruellest month, breeding From narrative method to mythical method
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing DA
Memory and desire, stirring Datta: what have we given?
Dull roots with spring rain. My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
The poem swarms with anguished visions. His characters dwell Which an age of prudence can never retract
in a grim, unsettling atmosphere that recalls Edvard Munch’s By this, and this only, we have existed
last paintings.
While reviewing James Joyce‘s Ulysses in 1922, Eliot coined an
expression that perfectly fits The Waste Land, too: mythical
method. Eliot claimed that the chaos of the world did not allow
for coherent narrative paths in the modern era. Therefore, the
writer was forced to give up the simple narration and confront
old archetypes, building his work as a mosaic of previous texts
and influences. He shared this vision with Pound, who
Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892) developed the mythical method in his poem Cantos. The Waste
Land opens with a dedication: “For Ezra Pound, il miglior
fabbro” (the best artisan, a quote from Dante’s Purgatory). took the place of literature and classics, it must have felt, to
Pound was very committed to Eliot’s poem and he was a severe Eliot, as though he was shouting into the wind. However, ‘The
editor, and The Waste Land originally started life at nearly 850 Waste Land‘s merit stems from the fact that it embodies so
lines. Eliot, in turn, possibly over-enthralled by Pound, applied much knowledge within the poem itself. It serves as a living
most of his cuts and corrections and changes. testimony to the enmeshed pattern of human spirit and human
culture.
Social critique or personal relief? However, the fragmented writing that Eliot was infamous for –
Indeed, The Waste Land is one of the most significant poems of see also The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock – makes the poem
20th-century literature and influences the work of many other a daunting one to analyse. It is split up into five sections, each
artists in different fields. The songs April by Deep Purple and of which has a different theme at the centre of its writing, as
The Cinema Show by Genesis evoke Eliot’s poem images. And well as addendums to the poem itself which were published
Stephen King declared it was his source of inspiration for The largely at the behest of the publisher himself, who wanted
Dark Tower saga. some reason to justify printing The Waste Land as a separate
poem in its own book.
Despite its evident erudition and philosophy, Eliot often
declared that The Waste Land was not born as a social critique. Although not a part of the poem quoted below, the allusions
Along with ennui and despair of the world post-World War 1, start before that: the poem was originally preceded by a Latin
his problems and frustrations lay both with his mental stress epigraphy from The Satyricon, a comedic manuscript written by
from balancing writing with his day job and caring for a Gaius Petronius, about a narrator, Encolpius, and his hapless
frequently sick wife, Vivienne who needed regular medical and unfaithful lover. The phrase reads, in English, ‘I saw with
intervention. my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the
boys said to hear, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I
Eliot dismissed the approving reviews of the poem as want to die’.’
expressing the disillusionment of a generation – “I may have
expressed for them their illusion of being disillusioned,” he said, Not a cheery way to start the poem: the oracle Sibyl is granted
“but that was not my intention.” During a conference at immortality by Apollo, but not eternal youth or health, and so
Harvard University, he claimed to feel flattered by the success she grows older and older, and frailer, and never dies. The
of the poem. However, he also confessed that it was nothing meaninglessness of the oracle of Sibyl’s life is a testimony and
but a relief from his tragedies and “a useless complaint against an allusion to the meaninglessness of culture, according to
life”. Agnese Mosconi Eliot; by putting that particular quotation from ‘The Satyricon’
………………………………………………………………………………………….. at the start, he encapsulates the very sense of The Waste Land:
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot culture has become meaningless, and dragged on for nothing.
T.S. Eliot was no stranger to classical literature. Early on in his Following that quote, there is a dedication to Ezra Pound, il
life, due to a congenital illness, he found his refuge in books miglior fabbro. Originally, The Waste Land was supposed to be
and stories, and this is where the classics-studded poem The twice as long as it was – Pound took it and edited it down to the
Waste Land stems from. Drawing allusions from everything version that was later published. However, il miglior fabbro can
from the Fisher King to Buddhism, The Waste Land was also be considered to be an allusion to Dante’s Purgatorio (‘the
published in 1922 and remains one of the most important best smith of the mother tongue’, writes Dante, about
Modernist texts to date. troubadour Arnaut Daniel), as well as Pound’s own The Spirit of
Modernist poetry, itself a calling-back to older ways of writing, Romance, a book of literary criticism where the second chapter
and developing, in part, as a response to overwrought Victorian is ‘Il Miglior Fabbro’, translated as ‘the better craftsman’.
poetry, started in the early years of the 20th century, with the Although originally written in ink, later versions of the poem
intent of bringing poetry to the layman – similar to included the dedication to Pound as a part of the poem’s
Wordworth’s attempt over a hundred years before. Long publication.
poems were unusual in modernist poetry, however, post the
1930s, longer poetry took over from the shorter sequences and Eliot also included the following quote, headed underneath
sound poetry of the 1920s. The Waste Land signified the ‘Notes’: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the
movement from Imagism – optimistic, bright-willed to incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss
modernism, itself a far darker, disillusioned way of writing. Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to
Some of the mythology used within The Waste Land was, at the Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss
time, considered obscure – bits from the Hindu Upanishads, Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much
from Buddhist lore, and the lesser-known legends of the better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from
Arthuriana are woven throughout the narrative, bringing forth the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such
several different voices, experiences, and cultures within the elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of
poem. anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has
Summary: It is difficult to tie one meaning to The Waste Land. influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden
Ultimately, the poem itself is about culture: the celebration of Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Attis Adonis
culture, the death of culture, the misery of being learned in a Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will
world that has largely forgotten its roots. Eliot wrote it as a immediately recognise in the poem certain references to
eulogy to the culture that he considered to be dead; at a time vegetation ceremonies.”
when dancing, music, jazz, and other forms of popular culture Detailed Analysis
I. The Burial of the Dead
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
April is the cruellest month, breeding Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
Memory and desire, stirring A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
Dull roots with spring rain. And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
Winter kept us warm, covering And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding There is shadow under this red rock,
A little life with dried tubers. (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee And I will show you something different from either
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, Your shadow at morning striding behind you
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. Frisch weht der Wind
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, Der Heimat zu
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, Mein Irisch Kind,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Wo weilest du?
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
In the mountains, there you feel free. “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Immediately, the poem starts with the recurring imagery of Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
death: ‘April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
with spring rain’. Note the cadence of every –ing ending to the Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
sentence, giving it a breathless, uneven sort of reading: when Oed’ und leer das Meer.
one reads it, there is a quick-slow pace to it that invites the Here is another of Eliot’s allusions ‘son of man/ you cannot say
reader to linger over the words. or guess’, which is directly lifted from The Call of Ezekiel, in the
Book of Ezekiel. This is how God addresses Ezekiel, and the use
The use of the word ‘winter’ provides an oxymoronic idea: the of it in the poem elevates Eliot to a god-like position, and
idea that cold, and death, can somehow be warming – reduces the reader to nothing more than a follower; this could
however, it isn’t the celebration of death, as it would be in also have been put in as a response to the vast advancements
other poems of the time, but a cold, hard fact. Winter is the of the time, where science made great leaps of technology,
time for normal life to hibernate, to become suspended, and however the spiritual and cultural sectors of the world lay
thus the anxiety of change and of new life is avoided. At the forgotten, according to Eliot.
time of writing, Eliot was suffering from an acute state of
nerves, and it could well be the truth behind the poem that ‘A heap of broken images’ shows the fragmented nature of the
change was something he was actively avoiding. world, and the snapshots of what the world has become further
serves to pinpoint the emptiness of a world without culture, a
‘Starnbergersee’, and its shower of regenerating rain, refers to world without guidance or spiritual belief. Eliot himself noted
the countess Marie Louise Larisch’s native home of Munich. The that this is from Ecclesiastes 12, a book within the Bible that
reference to ‘Hofgarten’ also calls back to Munich; it is a garden discuss the meaning of life, and the borne duty of man to
in the centre of Munich, located between the Residenz, and the appreciate his life. The references to shadows seems to imply
Englischer Garden, and she stands as a symbolic reference to that there is something larger and far more greater than the
European decadence, and thus, unavoidably, of Imagism. Marie reader skulking along beside the poem, lending it an air of
Louise Larisch’s presence in the poem can be put down to quite menace and the narrator an air of omnipotence, of being
a few reasons – after the crushing misery of the First World everywhere at once.
War, Marie Louise Larisch was a symbol of Old-World decadent The German in the middle is from Tristan and Isolde, and it
Europe, the kind from before the war. concerns the nature of love – love, like life, is something given
The two experiences recounted here could also well be seen as by God, and humankind should appreciate it because it so very
the dualistic nature of the world. From before the war – Marie easily disappears. In Tristan and Isolde, the main idea behind
and her cousin go sledding, that sense of excitement and the opera is that while death conquers all and unites grieving
adventure, ‘in the mountains, there you feel free’, and then the lovers, love itself only causes problems in the first place, and
reference to ‘drank coffee, and talked for an hour’, which could therefore it is death that should be celebrated, and not love.
stand for the post-war world, boring and sterile and emptied of The use of it in Eliot’s poem adds to the idea of a welcomed
all nuance, unlike the pre-war world. The separation of the two death, of death needing to appear.
stanzas by German further emphasizes the idea that, while both Another reference to tragic love, and uniting death, occurs in
alike, the two worlds remain at parallels to each other – ‘Bin gar the use of the flowers ‘hyacinth’. Hyacinth was a young Spartan
keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch’ means ‘I am prince who caught the eye of Apollo, and in a tragic accident,
not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, I am a real German’. Apollo killed him with his discus. Mourning his lover, Apollo
This phrase further emphasises the separation that the author, turned the drops of blood into flowers, and thus was born the
and the reader, then, feels. flower Hyacinth. There are twofold reasons for the reference to
Hyacinth: one, the legend itself is a miserable legend of death landscape of the Waste land itself. Once more, it moves to
once more uniting thwarted lovers and, two, the allusion to water – the ‘man with three staves’ being the representation of
homosexuality would have, itself, been problematic. the Fisher King, who was wounded by his own Spear, and is
Homosexuality was not tolerated at the time of Eliot’s writing, regenerated through water given to him from the Holy Grail.
and so he could be attempting to give the silenced a voice by Unreal City,
referencing Hyacinth, one of the most obvious homosexual Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
Greek myths. However, to continue with the same theme in the A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
poem, the evidence of love will be lost to death, and there will I had not thought death had undone so many.
be nothing more existing. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
The stanza ends with another quote from Tristan and Isolde, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
this time meaning ‘empty and desolate the sea’. To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
Had a bad cold, nevertheless “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
The lady of situations. “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, ‘Unreal City’ references Baudelaire’s The Seven Old Men, from
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Fleurs du Mal. It was written at the time when Paris was
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, considered a decadent, overwrought paradise of science,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find technology, and innovation, but not very much culture; thus,
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. Paris, in Baudelaire’s writing, takes on a nightmarish landscape.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Here, Eliot uses it in much the same effect: a nightmarish
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, landscape that is not quote Paris, and is not quite London, but
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: is meant to stand in for several places at once.
One must be so careful these days.
Cleanth Brooks writes: “The fortune-telling of “The Burial of the ‘Mylae’ is a symbol of warfare – it was a naval battle between
Dead” will illustrate the general method very satisfactorily. On the Romans and Carthage, and Eliot uses it here as a stand-in
the surface of the poem the poet reproduces the patter of the for the First World War, to show that humanity has never
charlatan, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface irony: the changed, that war will never change, and that death itself will
contrast between the original use of the Tarot cards and the never change.
use made by Madame Sosostris. But each of the details
(justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) ‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men’ is a
assumes a new meaning in the general context of the poem. paraphrasing of a quote from John Webster’s The White Devil,
There is then, in addition to the surface irony, something of a a play about the Vittoria Accoramboni murder. In the play, a
Sophoclean irony too, and the “fortune-telling,” which is taken character named Marcello is murdered, and his mother
ironically by a twentieth-century audience, becomes true as the tearfully implores Flamineo to keep ‘the wolf far thence, that’s
poem develops–true in a sense in which Madame Sosostris foe to men / for with his nails he’ll dig them up again’. If he is
herself does not think it true. The surface irony is thus reversed dug up again, then his spirit will never find rest, and he will
and becomes an irony on a deeper level. The items of her never be reborn – here, Eliot, capitalizing on the quote, changes
speech have only one reference in terms of the context of her it so that the attempt to disturb rebirth is seen as a good thing.
speech: the “man with three staves,” the “one-eyed merchant,” After all, Eliot is implying, who would want to be reborn in a
the “crowds of people, walking round in a ring,” etc. But world without culture?
transferred to other contexts they become loaded with special
meanings. To sum up, all the central symbols of the poem head II. A GAME OF CHESS
up here; but here, in the only section in which they are
explicitly bound together, the binding is slight and accidental. The second stanza moves on from the description of the
The deeper lines of association only emerge in terms of the landscape – the titular waste land – to three different settings,
total context as the poem develops–and this is, of course, and three more different characters. The title is taken from two
exactly the effect which the poet intends.” plays by Thomas Middleton, wherein the idea of a game of
chess is an exercise in seduction.
The Phoenician sailor could be a reference to Shakespeare’s
The Tempest; in this particular stanza, several images intermesh The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
between water and rock, starting with the allusion to the Glowed on the marble, where the glass
tempest (water being the symbol used by Eliot for rejuvenation Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
and regeneration) and then moving on to the idea of Belladona, From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
‘the lady of the rocks’, i.e. the never-changing and desolate (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair,
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
Decadence and pre-war luxury abounds in the first part of this
stanza. The references to ‘throne’ could be attempting to
pinpoint to Europe, or England, more specifically, but even
without the remits of place, the idea is of pre-war Europe, the
seductive and vicious Old World that American writers harped
on about in their works. However, the luxury that is written
about seems empty. The ‘golden Cupidon’ hides his face, and
the reference to jewels, ivory, and glass seems to show an
empty wealth – everything that is mentioned in the poem is a
symbol of extravagance, however the fact that it is glass and
ivory and jewels seems to suggest a certain fragility in its
wealth. Even the colours seem muted, and the light seems to
be fading throughout the first stanza, shedding light only for a
moment; as we read, the extravagance seems to be withering.
‘Laquearia’ is a type of panelling.
The reference to Paradise lost – ‘sylvan scene / The change of
Philomel, by the barbarous King’ – can be a reference to
everything that the world has lost since the First World War:
innocent soldiers, innocence in general, this sense of nothing
every quite being right again. It can also stand for the violent
death of culture, given away to the vapidity of the modern
world. There is a sense of altogether failure in this section – the
references to Cleopatra, Cupidon, sylvan scenes, and Philomen,
are references to failed love, to destruction of the status quo.
The description of the woman moves from powerful, and strong
– her wealth is her shield – to weak, thereby showing again the
difference between pre-war and post-war Europe, specifically
pre-war and post-war England. Once a noble country, now it is
old and doddering, crumbling (‘sad light / a carved dolphin
swam’; ‘withered stump of time’).
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
Here we see the insanity of the woman, thereby symbolising
that all her wealth has not done a thing for her mind, lending
the fragmented poem an even bigger sense of fragmentation,
and giving it a sense of loss, though the reader does not yet
know what we have lost. As this was written at the height of
spiritualism, one could imagine that it is trying to draw an
allusion to those grief-maddened mothers and mistresses and
lovers who contacted spiritualists and mediums to try and come
into contact with their loved ones. Alternatively, one can take it
as the embodiment of England, trying to reach out to her dead.
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
Reference to the First World War again – the trenches were
notorious for rats, and the use of this imagery further lends the
poem a sense of decay and rot.
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
Further fragmentation of the poem, to the point where even
the grammar seems to be suffering; ‘Shakespherian Rag’ was a
renaming of the ‘Mysterious Rag’, and it is furthermore
emphasising the death of culture for popular, high society
dances and popular culture in general. However, it is interesting
to note that he mentions Shakespeare again – once more, the
reader thinks of the Tempest, a drama set on a little island,
beset by ferocious storms.
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
The lack of purpose, lack of guidance, can be considered to be
one of the causes of madness, and the further descent into
fragmentation in the poem. There is a loose sense of time in
this particular stanza – from ‘the hot water at ten./ And if it
rains, a closed car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, /
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door’. It
lends the poem a sense of suspended animation, as it did in the
beginning, however here, the guideless manner of the people
seems to be loosely defined by very small happenings – their
days are structured through moments, rather than planned out.
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said,
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight
look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said,
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I’ve never been the
same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good
night.
‘Lil’ could reference Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was thrown
out of Eden for being too dominant. However, in the poem, it
could also be considered that Lil is merely a friend of the
narrator’s – a woman who was unfaithful to her husband; here
again is referenced the cloying and ultimately useless nature of
love (‘And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said’).
This seems to be built upon the idea of sex as the ultimate
expression of manliness, a theme that Eliot enjoyed exploring in
his works. The fact that the woman hints that there are ‘others
who will’ implies that she herself is sleeping with her friend’s
husband, however we cannot be certain of this.
This last part of the stanza seems to show the minutiae of the
upper-class in shoddy lighting – with a hard emphasis on the
nature of womanhood, and on the trials of womanhood. Lil is
‘only thirty one’ but looks much older; she took pills to ‘bring it
off’, which we later understand is to induce abortions, and
throughout the poem, the other woman attempts to give her
advice, however, the irony is that the other woman is, as well,
miserable, and wrapped up in her own misery to the point
where her advice seems to be a little skewed.
Peppered throughout the latter stanza of the poem is the
phrase ‘hurry up please its time’ giving a sense of urgency to
the poem that is at odds with the lackadaisical way that the
woman is recounting her stories – it seems to be building up to
an almost apocalyptic event, a dark tragedy, that she is
completely unaware of.
The last line references Ophelia, the drowned lover of Hamlet,
who famously thought ‘a woman’s love is brief’. Therefore, we
know for sure that this particular stanza of the poem is
referencing sex – the ultimate pleasure for a man, and a duty of
the woman’s.
III. THE FIRE SERMON
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are
departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
The line ‘Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song’ is from
Spenser’s Prothalamion, and it references a marriage song. In
Spenser, water represents a joyous occasion, which is at odds
with its usage in Eliot’s Waste land. Here, the water once more
represents a loss of life – although there is the sign of human
living, there are no humans around.
The reference to ‘nymph’ could be calling back to the
overarching idea of sex.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse.
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et, O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
There is no reason given, ultimately, for the wreckage of the
Waste Land; however, following the idea of the Fisher King, we
can assume this – that as the narrator suffers, so too does the
world. The world, with the loss of culture, is now a barren
continent, and with the onset of wars, has only served to
become even more ruined and destroyed.
 The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
‘Sweeney and Mrs Porter in the spring’ – the legend of Diana, Endeavours to engage her in caresses
the hunting goddess, and Actaeon. Actaeon spied on Diana in Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
the bath, and Diana cursed him with becoming a stag, who was Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
torn to pieces by his own hounds. Here, Eliot tries again to Exploring hands encounter no defence;
show the ruin that love and lust can bring to the lofty spirit. His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
Et, O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole – ‘and O The scene that plays out illustrates Eliot’s idea about the death
those children’s voices singing in the dome’, which is French of higher beliefs, such as the idea of romance and love. Note
and from Verlaine’s Parsifal, about the noble virgin knight the lack of intimacy evidenced in the description above.
Percival, who can drink from the grail due to his purity. It stands
in this poem as a criticism of then-contemporary values; of the (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
down-grading of lust. Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
Twit twit twit And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Jug jug jug jug jug jug Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
So rudely forc’d. And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…
Tereu
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Unreal City Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Under the brown fog of a winter noon Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants When lovely woman stoops to folly and
C. i. f. London: documents at sight, Paces about her room again, alone,
Asked me in demotic French She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel And puts a record on the gramophone.
Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.
‘Mr. Eugenides’ has a dual meaning here – tying back to the “This music crept by me upon the waters”
merchant in Madame Sosostris’ tarot cards, as well as standing And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
in for the behaviour of soliciting gay men for affection. Canon O City City, I can sometimes hear
Street Hotel and the Metropole were well known for this sort of Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
behaviour among homosexual men, and thus once more, Eliot The pleasant whining of a mandoline
paints the cheapest possible sight of love. And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Of Magnus Martyr hold
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, The river sweats
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see Oil and tar
The barges drift
Tiresias is from Greek Mythology, and he was turned into a With the turning tide
woman as punishment by Hera for separating two copulating Red sails
snakes. In the poem, it just serves, again, as a symbol of the Wide
cheapness of love and affection. To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Drifting logs
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, Down Greenwich reach
The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights Past the Isle of Dogs.
Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Weialala leia
Out of the window perilously spread Wallala leialala
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, Elizabeth and Leicester
On the divan are piled (at night her bed) A reference to Elizabeth I, and the First Earl of Leicester, Robert
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. Dudley, who were rumoured to be having an affair.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— Beating oars
I too awaited the expected guest. The stern was formed
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A gilded shell
A small house-agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, Red and gold
One of the low on whom assurance sits The brisk swell
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. Rippled both shores
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, South-west wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
“Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.“
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised ‘a new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
“On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
‘To Carthage then I came’ references Augustine’s journey to
overcome his secular and pagan lifestyle. Contrasting with the
earlier part of the Fire Sermon, where Buddha was preaching
about abstaining, here the poem turns to Western religion –
however, regardless of their position, they’re written into the
poem with a slightly mocking overtone.
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
The circle of rebirth: the drowned sailor returns to the water,
and will be reborn again in time as he has ‘entered the
whirlpool’, and thus re-entered the cycle of life.
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
After the torch-light red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
The final section of the poem opens up with a recounting of the
events after Jesus was taken prison in the garden of
Gethsemane, and after the crucifixion itself. Notice the almost
apocalyptic language used in this part of the description, the
way the language itself seems to emphasize the silence through
the use of language words – ‘shouting’, ‘crying’, ‘reverberation’
are all words of noise, however this section of the poem brings
about an almost deathly quiet, and an intermeshing of life and
death that makes it difficult for the reader to tell whether the
states exist separately or together. ‘He who was living is now
dead’ also ties back to the idea of the rebirth sequence.
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
The apocalyptic imagery continues in the following section of
the stanza. Once more, the poem returns to its description of
the rock: the barren, desolate waste land of life that calls back
to the cultural waste land that Eliot is so scornful of, the lack of
life that corroborates to a lack of human faith. Water, the
symbol of rebirth and regeneration, is surrounded on all sides
by death, symbolized as rock, and thus leaving the idea of
rebirth ambiguous.
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
The hooded figure can be seen as some sort of guardian, an
allusion to the Biblical passage where Jesus joins two disciples
in walking to the tomb in Sepulchre, and a guide through the
chaotic mess of the world that is left behind. It is unclear if Eliot
is implying that poetry should itself be the guiding principle
which all people follow.
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
Another reference to the total destruction rendered by war – his barren waste land. ‘Shall I ate least set my lands in order?’ is
‘falling towers’ also calls the Biblical imagery of the tower of a quote from the Cible, from the Book of Isaiah: “Thus saith the
Babylon.
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the roof-tree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
Empty faith once more symbolized explicitly by the ’empty
chapel’. This can also reference the Chapel Perilous – the
graveyard for those who have sought the Holy Grail, and failed.
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
The imagery of the fisherman sitting on the shore – ‘with the
arid plain behind me’ – is a direct allusion to the Fisher King and
LORD, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live”.
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
In the very last stanza, Eliot hints at the reason for the
fragmentation of this poem: so that he could take us to
different places and situations. Ruins, no matter where they
are, are always ruins, and madness and death will never change
regardless of the difference in place.
Michael H. Levenson puts the last stanza into perspective from
a linguistic point of view: The poem concludes with a rapid
series of allusive literary fragments: seven of the last eight lines
are quotations. But in the midst of these quotations is a line to
which we must attach great importance: “These fragments I
have shored against my ruins.” In the space of that line the
poem becomes conscious of itself. What had been a series of
fragments of consciousness has become a consciousness of
fragmentation: that may not be salvation, but it is a difference,
for as Eliot writes, “To realize that a point of view is a point of
view is already to have transcended it.” And to recognize
fragments as fragments, to name them as fragments, is already
to have transcended them not to an harmonious or final unity
but to a somewhat higher, somewhat more inclusive,
somewhat more conscious point of view. Considered in this
way, the poem does not achieve a resolved coherence, but
neither does it remain in a chaos of fragmentation. Rather it
displays a series of more or less stable patterns, regions of
coherence, temporary principles of order the poem not as a
stable unity but engaged in what Eliot calls the “painful task of Eliot’s “Oxford year” (1914-15) was decisive. It was then that he
unifying.” encountered Ezra Pound. Soon after, perhaps betrayed by his
Historical Background: From the Modernism Lab at Yale “genius for dancing”, he met and married his first wife,
University: “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the Vivien(ne) Haigh-Wood. This self-inflicted wound, by many
‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” wrote accounts, holds the key to The Waste Land, which became a
Ezra Pound shortly after the poem was published in 1922. T.S. mirror to all his most acute marital difficulties. “All I wanted of
Eliot’s poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment Vivien,” he later wrote, cruelly, of this relationship, “was a
stemming both from the collective experience of the first world flirtation.” He had persuaded himself he was in love, “because I
war and from Eliot’s personal travails. Born in St. Louis, Eliot wanted to burn my boats” and stay in England with Pound. This
had studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before instinct was correct. Eventually, Pound would play a decisive
moving to London, where he completed his doctoral editorial role in the making of the poem.
dissertation on the philosopher F. H. Bradley. Because of the Eliot’s 1920 New Year resolution, to “get started” on his “long
war, he was unable to return to the United States to receive his poem”, came after some very difficult months. His marriage to
degree. He taught grammar school briefly and then took a job Vivien (who was also sleeping with Bertrand Russell) was going
at Lloyds Bank, where he worked for eight years. Unhappily from bad to worse, and he was struggling to make ends meet
married, he suffered writer’s block and then a breakdown soon professionally. In extremis, Eliot began to compose the lines
after the war and wrote most of The Waste Land while that would morph into a new poem, much longer than anything
recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age he had written before, with the working title He Do the Police in
of 33. Eliot later described the poem as “the relief of a personal Different Voices.
and wholly insignificant grouse against life…just a piece of
rhythmical grumbling.” Yet the poem seemed to his In The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Eliot had perfected a
contemporaries to transcend Eliot’s personal situation and radical modernist kind of dramatic monologue, given in a single
represent a general crisis in western culture. One of its major voice. Now, he was experimenting with a cubist narrative and
themes is the barrenness of a post-war world in which human “different voices”: a famous clairvoyant (Madame Sosostris), a
sexuality has been perverted from its normal course and the neurotic wife (“My nerves are bad tonight”), two cockneys
natural world too has become infertile. Eliot went on to convert yakking in a pub (“if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I
to a High Church form of Anglicanism, become a naturalized said”), another distracted woman “the hyacinth girl”, a
British subject, and turn to conservative politics. In 1922, wandering poet (“I had not thought death had undone so
however, his anxieties about the modern world were still many”) and a ragtime singer (“O O O O that Shakespeherian
overwhelming. Rag…”) to identify some of the most famous.
……………………………………………………………………………………………….
The 100 best nonfiction books: No 46 – The Waste Land by TS Intercut quasi-cinematically with these vernacular scraps are
Eliot (1922) Eliot’s other “fragments … shored against my ruins”. These
TS Eliot’s long poem, written in extremis, came to embody the include half-stated Christian and Buddhist themes, mixed with
spirit of the years following the first world war Arthurian legend and classical mythology. In the final section
“the Thunder” delivers some sonorous commands, until the
he Great War was a mass slaughter. It also became the catalyst crisis of the poem is brilliantly resolved with “Shantih shantih
for a social and cultural earthquake. But not until a young shantih”.
American poet began, in 1919, to address the desolate In Eliot’s own life, there were no commensurate reconciliations,
aftermath of this Armageddon did the interwar years begin to just the daily torment of his marriage to Vivien, who suffered
acquire the character we now associate with the 1920s, and equally from her life with “Tom”. At the end of 1919, she wrote:
also become explicable to the survivors of an apocalypse. “Glad this awful year is over … Next probably worse.” Eliot,
almost as fragile as his wife, took himself off to Lausanne to
The Waste Land has attracted many labels, from the consult a therapist. It was here that he wrote the haunting last
quintessential work of “modernism” to the “poetical equivalent verses of his work-in-progress as if “in a trance”.
to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring”. It was also one of those very rare
works that both embody and articulate the spirit of the age. As By January 1922, The Waste Land was ready for submission to
such, it would be adored, vilified, parodied, disparaged, the Dial and, more importantly, Ezra Pound’s maieutic
obsessed over, canonised and endlessly recited. brilliance. Pound had no doubt of its genius. “About enough,
Eliot’s poem,” he wrote, “to make the rest of us shut up shop.”
A generation after its publication, Evelyn Waugh would conjure
the mood of interwar Oxford, and Charles Ryder’s initiation into For Eliot, meanwhile, 1922 was almost as troubled as 1919.
university life in Brideshead Revisited, by having Anthony While he wrestled with the final draft of The Waste Land, his
Blanche declaim The Waste Land at the top of his voice from distracted wife Vivien was undergoing a new treatment,
Sebastian Flyte’s balcony. Ovarian Opocaps, distilled from “the glands of animals”, plus a
starvation diet. The result was colitis, high temperatures,
TS Eliot first announced “a long poem I have had in my mind for insomnia and migraine. Rarely had life and art been so
a long time” in a letter to his mother at the end of 1919. inextricably braided together.
Actually, its origins can be traced to 1914, the year the young
poet finally left Harvard and crossed to Europe, settling first in The Waste Land is a poem of its time, and for all time. It is
Oxford, as the first world war began. about ghosts and heroes, civilians and veterans, and recently
mobilised wartime women exposed to predatory young men; it
is about loss and despair, sex and madness, seduction and grief,
and the poet’s own anguished quest for meaning in a shattered
and desolate world.

Ezra Pound would play the role of the midwife in delivering this
disturbing and extraordinary new voice to the poetry-reading
public and ultimately the canon, but crucial though his
intervention undoubtedly was in focusing the text, his editor’s
scissors hardly touched the basic structure of Eliot’s vision. The
five parts of The Waste Land are: The Burial of the Dead; A
Game of Chess; The Fire Sermon; Death by Water; What the
Thunder Said.
The sections that Eliot (and Pound) agreed to drop include:
Song. For the Opherion, The Death of the Duchess, Elegy and
Dirge. Published in 1971, the facsimile and original transcript
edition, edited by Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow, gives a
remarkable insight into the process by which The Waste Land
achieved its final form. For the critic Cyril Connolly, who came
of age during the years of The Waste Land, this is the essential
version: it was, he wrote, “indispensable for all lovers of poetry,
students of the early 20th century, and survivors like myself”.

In 1922, the original edition, a text of 434 lines, was followed by

several pages of notes, which were requested by the New York
publisher Horace Liveright, to justify publishing the work as a
book.

Eliot himself affected a certain unease at the claims made for

The Waste Land. He told one American literary friend that
“various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem
in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have
considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To
me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant
grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”

A signature sentence
“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

Three to compare
JG Frazer: The Golden Bough (1890)
Jessie Weston: From Ritual to Romance (1920)
Robert Graves: The White Goddess (1948)