100 Year of The Wasteland
T.S.Eliot's modernist classic "The Wasteland" was published in 1922, and celebrates its centenary this year. That same year the Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach in Paris.
Both are tricky, allusive, and sometimes incomprehensible. Both are also masterpieces. We all know the famous opening of The Wasteland
"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."
The poem adumbrates the great crisis of our own era, as our beloved Earth turns into a wasteland due to climate change. We live in a world, "where the sun beats / And the dead trees give no shelter." There is "dry sterile thunder without rain."
Whatever one may think of the difficulty inherent in reading The Wasteland, nobody with a taste for poetry can deny the resonance of these lines.
The poem is divided into five sections: The Burial of the Dead; A Game of Chess; The Fire Sermon; Death by 'Water; and What the Thunder Said.
What did the thunder say? Feast your eyes and ears on this brilliant stanza:
"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 addition to being one of the greatest 20th century poets, Eliot was a seminal critic, and wrote lengthy explanations and notes about "The Wasteland". I confess that I've never read them. I have read the poem,and reread it again today in honor of its Centenary. Here's a link to the entire poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... waste-land
Modernism seemed to reject the heroic and epic. It also rejected the realist novels of the 19th century. Or did it? Didn't Ulysses transform the heroic and supernatural Odyssey into the mundane? But didn't Joyce also point out the heroic that resides in the mundane. In the words of Joyce's Penelope figure Molly Bloom, "yes I said yes I will Yes."
