The Waste Land

The Waste Land, a long poem by the American writer T S Eliot, is one of the most famous
works of literary modernism.

Across the poem’s five sections – ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire
Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’ – Eliot presents a bleak picture of
the landscape of the contemporary world and its history; ‘the most important personage’,
as he put it, is ‘the old man with wrinkled dugs’ Tiresias, a hermaphroditic character
from Greek mythology who is blind, but can see into the future.

Rather than a single dramatic monologue, like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915),
woven throughout The Waste Land is a rich array of voices. This includes numerous literary
and cultural references from sources as diverse as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Conrad,
ancient Sanskrit, and First World War trench slang. In addition, the poem contains a variety of
musical references: Wagner, music hall, ragtime and nursery rhyme; and these sit alongside the
sounds of children sledging, horns and motor cars, pub chatter and the rattle of bones.

Eliot had the idea for the poem in 1914, but a breakdown brought on by his father’s death in
1919 precipitated its completion, and it has largely been read as a comment on the bleakness of
post-war European history. The pervasive metaphor of dryness is generally read as expressive
of spiritual emptiness.

The poem itself was heavily edited by Ezra Pound, another American expatriate poet living in
London at this time. Eliot gave Pound a copy of the 1922 edition with a handwritten dedication
to ‘il miglior fabbro’ – Italian for ‘the better craftsman’ – and added it to the 1925 printed
edition in his Poems 1909–1925.

Yet looking back, Eliot felt it ended up overshadowing his other work, and described it not so
much as ‘an important bit of social criticism’, but as ‘the relief of a personal and wholly
insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. These rhythms
are indeed intensely of the time, and include hints of jazz and popular song.

The Waste Land was first published in 1922 in Criterion, a magazine edited by Eliot, then a few
days later in the magazine The Dial, and later that year, as a book by Boni & Liveright in New
York. This latter edition included ‘Notes’ explaining some of the vast range of references
contained in the poem, and its particular basis on the legend of the Holy Grail, and the
vegetation ceremonies in The Golden Bough (1890; expanded 1906–1915), a comparative study
of world mythology by J G Frazer. However, in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, in 1956, Eliot
described these notes as ‘a remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship’, which he had only
written to make the text long enough for book publication.
T S Eliot's The Waste Land is full of references to other literary works. Seamus Perry
takes a look at four of the most important literary presences in the poem: Shakespeare,
Dante, James Joyce and William Blake.
One of Eliot’s friends, Conrad Aiken, wrote a review of The Waste Land which was published
under the title ‘An Anatomy of Melancholy’. When Eliot heard he was extremely cross
because, as he said to Aiken, ‘There is nothing melancholy about it!’ Aiken defended
himself: ‘The reference, Tom, was to BURTON’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the quite
extraordinary amount of quotation it contains!’ Of course the poem is not really very much
like The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is a 17th-century compendium of contemporary
learning about almost everything; but Aiken was right to draw his readers’ attention to one of
the poem’s most striking innovations: the intensity and intricacy of its relationship with other
works of literature – sometimes a matter of quoting them, sometimes of misquoting them or
gesturing towards them. All texts exist within the world of other texts, literary and otherwise;
but Eliot’s poem to an unprecedented extent establishes itself as what it is through thoughts of
what other people’s poems are.

In his famously scathing review of The Waste Land, F L Lucas attacked T S Eliot’s use of
literary allusion and footnotes.

Dozens of authors and texts accompany the poem: Eliot’s own notes identify many of them, and
dozens of other allusions have been suggested since. The poem resounds with things other than
literature too: at different moments it tunes in to Wagnerian opera, rag music, Eastern scripture,
nursery rhymes, the call of the pub landlord at closing time; and occasionally it sounds noises
beyond the human too – the cries of birds (a thrush, a cockerel) and the rolling of thunder. Eliot
wrote strikingly in his prose works about the way that the totality of a society’s life, high and
low, properly comes together to constitute its complete ‘culture’; and although the society
portrayed in The Waste Land is anything but coherent and whole, as Eliot thought a healthy
culture required, the spread of the poem’s range speaks to his abiding preoccupation with the
way that very different sorts of fragmentary experience may co-exist fruitfully as parts of a
single, larger, inclusive sort of experience. The canon of Western literature is only one of the
things that is drawn into the difficult synthesis of The Waste Land, but it is one of the most
important; and of all the great authors present in the poem, four contribute more than most to
the ways in which Eliot uses the recollection of pre-existing texts to create new kinds of
meaning: they are Shakespeare, Dante, Joyce and Blake.

The Waste Land by T S Eliot, Hogarth Press edition

Shakespeare
Four plays inhabit the imagination of The Waste Land with particular presence: Antony and
Cleopatra, Hamlet, Coriolanus and The Tempest. The ancient clash of empires which shapes
the erotic tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra anticipates the poem’s modern interweaving of
European war and personal catastrophe, a parallel which the opening lines of Part 2 brings to
the surface: the faltering rhythm of ‘The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne’, mishears
Enobarbus’s great description of Cleopatra on her sumptuous royal barge (not ‘Chair’), offering
a depleted Cleopatra for diminished times. Much of the poem is preoccupied with suffering of a
specifically female kind, and if the archetype of Cleopatra involves a downfall that is at least
partly the work of her own hands, then the death and madness of Ophelia, from Hamlet, is more
unmitigatedly a portrait of victimhood.

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

In the last line, the voice of Ophelia, in the play distracted by grief, tunes in with the blurry
farewells at closing time. ‘Her speech is nothing’, we are told of Ophelia in Hamlet, ‘Yet the
unshaped use of it doth move / The hearers to collection’, which would be a good epigraph for
Eliot’s poem, in which unshaped fragments are collected by their hearers to infer meaning. The
figure of Coriolanus represents a different element threading through the poem: the precarious
imagining, within so much vividly imagined failure, of the scope and conditions of human
success. In Part 5, ‘aethereal rumours’ are said to ‘Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus’:
the reference brings into the poem’s mind a brutal and deeply unlikeable Roman hero whose
violent life comes to an end after a single defining moment; formerly hell-bent on destroying
Rome, he finally chooses not to do so after all, but knows the decision will be his ruin. He
represents the possibility of morally transformative self-sacrifice, a theme (as in a musical
theme) that is also heard whenever The Tempest comes into the airwaves of the poetry: it is
Shakespeare’s great romance of reconciliation and renunciation and metamorphosis, and Eliot is
haunted especially by a line from one of its songs, describing the imagined aftermath of a
drowning (of which the poem has a number) – ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes!’ The
possibility of human transformation haunts the poem, but the line suggests, too, an account of
its main poetic method: the conjuring of a mass of inherited elements into ‘something rich and
strange’.

Dante
The greatest poem that Eliot wrote before The Waste Land was ‘The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock’, and the works share a Dantesque perspective on contemporary life.
Dante’s Divine Comedy (completed 1320), widely regarded as the central masterpiece of
Italian poetry, tracks the journey of its protagonist through Hell and Purgatory, finally
arriving at the peak of Paradise. Eliot’s interest in his earlier poems is on the quality of
infernal experience as Dante imagines it, the tormenting mixture of ‘Memory and desire’
that Eliot had announced in the opening lines. ‘The ecstasy, with the present thrill at the
remembrance of it, is a part of the torture’, wrote Eliot in an essay about Dante published in The
Sacred Wood, his critical collection of 1920: ‘For in Dante’s Hell souls are not deadened, as
they mostly are in life; they are actually in the greatest torment of which each is capable’. When
a crowd flows over London Bridge in Part 1 of The Waste Land, the note brings to mind a
parallel we might have dimly felt from the Inferno: ‘I had not thought death had undone so
many’. Much later, in the crash of the poem’s last lines, another voice from Dante’s poem
emerges, but now from the Purgatorio, the next stage in the journey. It is a voice from the dead
who asks to be remembered. Eliot quotes the line that follows the speech: ‘Poi s’ascose ne foco
che gli affina’, meaning ‘Then he hid him in the fire which refines them’. The flames of
Purgatory are unlike the flames of Hell which otherwise they seem to resemble so closely: they
are agonising but their function is not to punish but to amend, for they work purposively to burn
away sin and prepare the willing soul (agonisingly) for its progress. It is one of several threads
in Part V that show a movement of the spirit, however doctrinally unspecific it might be at this
stage in Eliot’s life, towards something other than the perpetuity of the waste.

Joyce
The poet Ezra Pound had a decisive shaping impact on the poem, reading it in manuscript and
making many suggestions; but of Eliot’s contemporaries it is James Joyce who is the most
important presence. The atmosphere of his book of short stories, Dubliners (1914), is one
influence: they present a series of case studies in disconnection and human failure which
anticipates in many ways the broken relationships of Eliot’s poem. ‘He felt his moral nature
falling to pieces’, says Joyce of one of his Dubliners at one point, the normal condition. Eliot’s
ear was evidently caught, in particular, by the tragic-comic possibilities implicit in tipsy
farewells:

‘Good-night, Gabriel. Good-night, Gretta!’

‘Good-night, Aunt Kate, and thanks ever so much. Goodnight, Aunt Julia.’
‘O, good-night, Gretta, I didn't see you.’
‘Good-night, Mr. D’Arcy. Good-night, Miss O’Callaghan.’
‘Good-night, Miss Morkan.’
‘Good-night, again.’
‘Good-night, all. Safe home.’
‘Good-night. Good night.’

‘Good night, Bill. Good night, Lou. Good night, George. Good night. / Ta ta. Good night. Good
night’: T S Eliot’s manuscript revisions to the close of Part II of The Waste Land, a scene which
echoes the tipsy farewells in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914).

Joyce exerted another influence on Eliot besides Dubliners. As Eliot was thinking about his
poem he was reading the instalments of Joyce’s new novel as they appeared: after its
publication in book form, Eliot would celebrate Ulysses in a way which spoke to the interests of
his own poem very clearly. Joyce’s novel sets incidents in contemporary Dublin against
episodes in the Odyssey, running in parallel the story of his Mr Bloom and Ulysses: ‘in
manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’, Eliot said,

Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators,
any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own,
independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a
shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history.

Ulysses is in many ways a joyous book, and it is doubtful that Eliot has the tone quite right; but
it is very true that his own poem worked by effecting a series of parallels between ancient
stories and modern unhappinesses – between Cleopatra and a distracted Londoner, Tiresias and
a typist.
As he was composing The Waste Land, T S Eliot was drawn to the way in
which Ulysses (1922) parallels ancient myth and contemporary Dublin.

In this November 1923 review of Ulysses, T S Eliot celebrated James Joyce’s use of myth,
‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’.

Blake
William Blake (1757–1827) is Eliot’s greatest precursor as a poet who cast London as Hell:
critics do not often find him in the language of the poem, though Pound for one thought a pair
of lines in Eliot’s manuscript too close to him to stand. ‘Blake. Too often used’, he wrote, next
to ‘To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the time / With a dead sound on the final stroke of
nine’. Eliot changed ‘the time’ to ‘the hours’, presumably to avoid the misrhyme that Pound
thought too obviously Blakean: it seems a dubious improvement when hearing ‘a dead sound’
was precisely what was at issue. Generally, though, Blake makes himself felt in The Waste
Land – as he doesn’t to any extent in Eliot’s other works – as a spirit, as particularly the poet
who wrote:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
                                                           (‘London’, Songs of Experience [1794])

Ezra Pound recommended that T S Eliot amend or delete a pair of lines in The Waste Land that
he thought resembled William Blake too closely, commenting ‘Blake. Too often used’ in the
manuscript draft.

‘London’ from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794.

Eliot admired Blake hugely at this stage in his life, and wrote about him in The Sacred Wood:

Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or
abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion,
have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour of simplification,
exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul. And this honesty never exists
without great technical accomplishment.

Something not dissimilar might be said of The Waste Land, shortly to come together in Eliot’s
mind.