Eliot's The Waste Land

[Adagio]

I have heard so much about this poem but I have still yet to pick it up. Anyone a fan? I would what your thoughts are on Eliot and his poem. Is it worth reading? What background knowledge is needed to get on well with it?

[mayneverhave]

This is possibly my favorite poem, though despite reading it quite a few times along with numerous critical articles, I'm not anywhere close to completely understanding it.

The background reading necessary for full enjoyment - note the poem is still enjoyable without the background - is pretty extensive, perhaps more extensive than any other poem in the English language - the Ulysses of poetry.

As for figuring out what you have to read: I'd recommend looking at Eliot's own annotations to The Waste Land, and pick up the Norton Critical edition of the poem which provides excerpts from the myriad sources that Eliot drew upon.

These sources should not be ignored. Eliot was very much concerned with tradition, the decay of tradition, and in The Waste Land he brings together works from a variety of genres and cultures and merges them into a variety of meanings, even going so far as to suggest new readings of the original texts themselves. For one, I can't read the opening of the Canterbury Tales without thinking of The Waste Land.

[Lokasenna]

This is possibly my favorite poem, though despite reading it quite a few times along with numerous critical articles, I'm not anywhere close to completely understanding it.

I suspect Eliot didn't really understand it either!

Its absolutely worth a read. Its long, but not huge by any means. One of my favourite pieces of poetry... let us know what you think!

[Neely]

I have heard so much about this poem but I have still yet to pick it up. Anyone a fan? I would what your thoughts are on Eliot and his poem. Is it worth reading? What background knowledge is needed to get on well with it?

Naw, it is rubbish, (just joking).

You should read around the whole idea behind "the modernist movement" so to speak, look into why fragmentation is important and the like. Given a little background into the whole idea behind this and it starts to make a little sense.

Read the poem without this and you will probably think Eliot is just crackers!

[Paulclem]

It is well worth the read, and it is one of those works that you come back to and get a deeper sense every time. I've been reading it since sixth form. I didn't do any backgond reading at tha time, but I still recognised the great poety in there even if I didn't get much of it. A little study may well ay dividends, but it would be good to recognise that this is a difficult poem to understand a first second etc reading. It's a brilliant poem though.

[Virgil]

Wikipedia is usually a good outline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land

And use the hypertext version with notes here as a crutch:
http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/

It's a great work and possibly the most important 20th century poem in English.

[Michael T]

In my opinion the amount of influence and editing on the poem by Ezra Pound would suggest that the poem could almost be called collaboration between the two poets.

[Virgil]

In my opinion the amount of influence and editing on the poem by Ezra Pound would suggest that the poem could almost be called collaboration between the two poets.

That has crossed my mind too, but all editors have a hand in many published works. At what point is it a colaboration? Pound did not add anything (his voice was completely different) but he did cut. I would say it's not a collaboration.

[Paulclem]

Pound didn't claim that though did he? Wasn't it the case that he commented and struck out rather than added? A bit like a poetic editor.

[JBI]

I suspect Eliot didn't really understand it either!

Its absolutely worth a read. Its long, but not huge by any means. One of my favourite pieces of poetry... let us know what you think!

It's 50% or so Pound, Eliot just got all the credit - you can almost tell the Pound lines from the pure Eliot lines, from the gentle touches Pound employs (a style borrowed much from Romance-language verse) and the drudge sort of heavy lines that Eliot used.

Even so, when it comes to background, an overall understanding of the texts involved is an asset - though one may not know The Golden Bough, for instance, one still should be adept with some of the footnotes - Faber put out a decent companion book, as well as other scholarly works are usually worth the money. They really seem to add to the understanding.

As for fully understanding it - I've read it over 100 times and each time it is different - the poem is always intense, and always too big - Pound himself rightfully called it the Longest Poem Ever Written, and it holds to that - there is just so much in it.

[Virgil]

It's 50% or so Pound, Eliot just got all the credit - you can almost tell the Pound lines from the pure Eliot lines, from the gentle touches Pound employs (a style borrowed much from Romance-language verse) and the drudge sort of heavy lines that Eliot used.

Whoa, where do you get that Pound actually added lines? I do not believe that is true at all. In fact here: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps...omposition.htm.

Which lines do you think are so evidently Pound's?

[JBI]

Something like this sounds like Pound to me:

A current under sea 315
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

The lines seem to be more outwardly lyric in the musical sense than the sort of stuff one expects from Eliot - of course, Eliot wrote most of the stuff, but there is more Pound in there than some critics like to realize - I don't have manuscript facsimiles in front of me, but one can almost pick at it, and see how Pound really is responsible for the coherency and structuring of the poem.

Edit: just flipping through the articles, it makes sense that I should choose that quote;

Consider what happens to "Death by Water," which Pound reduced from ninety-two lines to ten. The first section, written in quatrains rhyming abab, introduces a parodic version of Ulysses in the person of a foolish sailor on shore leave, regaling his cronies in the public bars, who are "Staggering, or limping with a comic gonorrhea," with stories of the "much seen and much endured." In the margin of the manuscript, Pound wrote, "Bad--but cant attack until I get typescript." The second section, written in rather slack Tennysonian blank verse, is the dramatic monologue of the sailor, telling of a fishing expedition from the Dry Salvages north to the Outer Banks of Nova Scotia. Even as the sailor meditates on the significance of a mysterious Sirens' song heard one night on watch (lines 65-72), a song that makes him question the relationship of reality to dream, the ship hits an iceberg and is destroyed. After this ending ("And if Another knows, I know I know not, / Who only knows that there is no more noise now"--) comes the "Phlebas the Phoenician" lyric, which is the only part of the original that remains in the finished poem.

[blazeofglory]

I have gone through this poem, a really wonderful poem that kind of moved me beyond measure and I still enjoy reading the poem. I do not care the philosophy beyond it, but the poem is a beauty here and that was exactly what moved me in point of fact

[mal4mac]

I read it without any support apparatus several years ago and was totally bemused. Some of the language is certainly beautiful, but I wouldn't attempt it again without a lot of help! The Norton Critical Edition may be necessary, it contains the texts you might need to decompress Eliot's compressions.

Check out IA Richards Principles of Literary Criticism, which is great full stop But it's especially great on Eliot's Waste Land to which he devotes an appendix. I took notes (it's on Questia which makes that easier.) Here are my notes:

The poem has no coherent intellectual thread, so is best viewed as isolated items of intellectual/emotional content united by interaction of emotional effects, not by an intellectual scheme that can be worked out by analysis.

The value lies in unified response. Intellectual activity only takes place in the realization of the separate items. Usually we demand intellectual coherence, so find the Waste Land find difficult because we are forced to do without it.

Allusions to The Aspern Papers, Othello, 'A Toccata of Galuppis', Marston, The Phoenix and the Turtle, Antony and Cleopatra (twice), 'The Extasie', Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Ruskin in Mr. Eliot's hands is a technical device for compression. 'The Waste Land' is an epic. Without this device twelve books would have been needed.

“Very much of the best poetry is necessarily ambiguous in its immediate effect. Even the most careful and responsive reader must read and do hard work before the poem forms itself clearly and unambiguously in his mind. An original poem, as much as a new branch of mathematics, compels the mind which receives it to grow, and this takes time.”

Is The Waste Land worth the trouble it entails? There is Miss Weston's From Ritual to Romance to read, and its 'astral' trimmings discarded. There is Canto Twenty-six of the Purgatorio to be studied. There is the central position of Tiresias to be puzzled out - and the cryptic note is tiresome.

“the poem still remains to be read. And it is easy to fail in this undertaking. An 'attitude of intellectual suspicion' must certainly be abandoned. But this is not difficult to those who still know how to give their feelings precedence to their thoughts, who can accept and unify an experience without trying to catch it in an intellectual net or to squeeze out a doctrine.”

“its symbols are not mystical, but emotional. They stand … not for ineffable objects, but for normal human experience.” The poem is radically naturalistic. It’s a 'music of ideas'. arranged, not to tell us something, but to combine into a coherent whole of feeling and attitude and produce a peculiar liberation of the will. They are to be responded to, not pondered or worked out.

“Mr. Eliot is neither sighing after vanished glories nor holding contemporary experience up to scorn."

"Both bitterness and desolation are superficial aspects. There are those who think that he merely takes his readers into the Waste Land and leaves them there, that in his last poem he confesses his impotence to release the healing waters. The reply is that some readers find in his poetry not only a clearer, fuller realization of their plight, the plight of a whole generation, than they find elsewhere, but also through the very energies set free in that realization a return of the saving passion.“

Richards inspires me to attempt Eliot again, but, amongst modernists, I'm planning to read Joyce and Proust first, so it might be some time....

[JBI]

The structure is built on four things really -

Five sections of division,
Allusion,
Symbol,
and myth.

The symbols themselves are dependent really on five images, fire/water garden/desert and The Unreal City, and the mythological structure is modeled, in a way similar to Joyce's Ulysses, on the grail quest, and the whole Fisher-King impotent kingdom. Allusions are strange in that they are more two directional than most allusions, and work to really change the works they cite, as well as change the work itself - I would recommend at least reading 85% of the obvious quotes - Spenser, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Dante, Wagner, etc. because that really helps - especially Wagner, who pretty much structures the third section of the poem.

There are really many editions, so, in all honesty, if you choose to get one, pick up a scholarly one with good footnotage, or a companion book - there is an academic text that catches far more allusions than anything else, but I wouldn't recommend starting with it, as, although it catches them, it leaves the explaining and understanding to the reader, and can really make things difficult for someone just starting The Waste Land.