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?
Printable View
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?
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.
I suspect Eliot didn't really understand it either!Quote:
Originally Posted by mayneverhave
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!
Naw, it is rubbish, (just joking).Quote:
Originally Posted by Adagio
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!
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.
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael T
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lokasenna
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Which lines do you think are so evidently Pound's?
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;
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.
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
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....
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.
After spending over two decades with this poem and reading countless secondary texts and background texts, contemporary texts, Eliot's other writings, above all continually thinking about this text over this period, I am NOW reaching some sort of a conclusion about my understanding of this work. It is a lament about a universal wasteland that the inter-war world had descended into (WWI came as a biger shock to human psyche compared to WWII, which although more destructive, had the effect of a softened blow because of the horrors of the previous War) and all the images, thoughts (negative or positive), memories and fears that this central theme could generate: a heap of broken images. There are religious, historical, cultural, psychological, literary, philosophical "echoes" throughout the text that point towards this loss of innocence. The poem moves like a vertigo and all these images rapidly drown into it. The movement becomes only faster as the poem moves towards its end, it becomes more and more chaotic but the theme of the loss of innocence, death, impotence, rape still remain omipresent and it all ends with culture, religion, history, literature, philosophy etc pointing at the revival in the very last stanza. 'This heap of broken images', 'these fragments' that the 'narrator' "shored against my ruin" at the end of the poem are themselves the redemption from sterility of modern time. This is Eliot's "Tradition", the combined and accumulated human creation that does not die but "undergoes a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange." Eliot, forever a traditionalist, believes that the combined force of human history and achievement would re-generate humanity. The poem is explicity universal. You can not interprate it on a personal level, at least not for a sustained period as Eliot himself walks in and out of the poem like countless other ghosts. There are no central characters.
Joyce's Ulysses, though published in the same year, provided the "mythical method" for Eliot to work on a mytho-poec structure. Ulysses can be interprated on many levels. "'History, said Stephen, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up'" (or something like that), there is no such desire to wake up in The Wasteland. For Stephen, the sound of the voices in the playground (humanity) is God. For Eliot, tradition is the God, the creator and destroyer, humanity's only defence against ultimate annihilation.
I don't think there's any evidence that Pound added lines. The manuscripts with Pound and Eliot's notes were published by Eliot's wife, The wasteland: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, and I don't think you can infer that any lines were added by Pound.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Having said that, Pound was cited as a collaborator and was supported by Eliot even when his Fascist views became well known for his literary talents. It's not the case that Eliot took all the glory, and after all he did write the poem.
The Waste Land is a personal favorite of mine. Nobody will ever know what it is about. It's just a series of thoughts and intertextuality. The best interpretation that I can give is that Europe is decayed, lost, and fragmented like the poem.
T.S. Eliot is one of the most popular poets of the 20th century. Eliot's `Wasteland' is considered a milestone in English poetry. One of his most loved poems is The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. Set in the big, dirty city, the speaker of the poem is a very unhappy man who is afraid of living and possesses a diffidence that is common to modern man. War, cities, boredom and fear – all these are classic modernistic themes and makes for thought-provoking concepts! Some interesting facts on Shmoop.com led me to think deeper about this poem, The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock.
Eliot himself in his volume The Waste Land and Other Poems gives extensive explication and footnotes about The Waste Land.
If by extensive you mean sparse - my critical editions give far more, and even leave many out - there are several books of scholarship that try to find all his sources, and even then they still get situations where they wonder if it is an allusion or a stretch, and what it could possibly mean. Eliot's footnotes are, if anything, cryptic and the more obvious ones anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jermac
Eliot's footnotes are extensive and they are not cryptic
Not that extensive.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jermac
yes that extensive
The annotations were only written so that The Waste Land could be published in book form.
As for the annotations themselves, some are notoriously missing, while the meaning of others, and what significance they have for the poem, is cryptic. Many could possibly be red herrings.
I don't recall any being red herrings, but they were cryptic and did not fully help. There are good resource books that can help.
In the early 80's when I was in the 6th form, we were introduced to The waste Land, but it was heavily influenced by what I thought were the attitudes of the teachers at the time - that Eliot was an elitist writer. The teachers I had at the time had strong socialist opinions which they inculcated in us all through school. It was a strong working class area, and so they were generally preaching to the converted. I just assumed that it was those teachers.
Recently a colleague of mine came out with the same ideas, and it turns out that the charge of elitism was also levelled at Eliot in a different part, and definately not socialist, part of the country.
I find this a part if the literary critical tradition which has been a stifling factor in certainly my colleague's study of Eliot. I strongly disagree with the teachers influencing me in the way they did at the time, but it also skewed my view of The Wasteland for a long time.
I think Eliot was elitist, but that should not have intruded so much into my experience of the poem which stands as a brilliant piece. Has this been other's experiences?
I love most of Eliot's poetry, certainly his major works. He is definitely an elitist, but what difference does that make as to the quality of his work? None for me, and frankly i get a kick out Eliot's elitism. :D
They basically just explain some of the allusions, as opposed to explaining the poem.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jermac
I like The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. At least it's easier to understand.
why would Eliot want to explain the poem
It's interesting though, that as Elitist he may seem, he also almost always feels insignificant, and unworthy of the tradition and praise that he receives:Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
From Four Quartets, East Coker V.Quote:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
What does this gesture to then, if we read it as reflecting back on earlier works? There is no real Eliot in the Wasteland, and, even if we read him into the Grail Knight, or the timid man at the beginning of section two, or even the Hyacinth recieving man from section one, there is no real sense of his beloning or of being an elite - he seems utterly reduced and part of the desolation of The Wasteland - he, throughout his whole career was uncertain of everything - so, in a sense he was Elitist, given the tradition in which he belongs to and his own obsessions, but on the other hand - well it makes no difference anyway - he was no more Elitist than Tennyson or Keats or whomever else, it's just their images are far easier for us to understand, as we are more want to understand the metaphor of a nymph than we are of a promontory as in seen in Dry Salvages III for instance.
He does seem rather humble in his poems, doesn't he. Good point.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I am agreeing with you. He is very humble in his poetry.Quote:
From Four Quartets, East Coker V.
What does this gesture to then, if we read it as reflecting back on earlier works?
I would say that Eliot is Tiresias in The Wastesland. If I recall correctly there is even a place where he says "I Tiresias..." I think his reputation as an elitist has to do more with his literary criticism. He is in the mold of Bloom as reverring a western cannon. Actually he tried to push out Milton from the cannon and he tried to ostracize DH Lawrence from the literary elite, considering him a primitive savage. Eliot really recoiled to Lawrence's open and honest sexuality.Quote:
There is no real Eliot in the Wasteland, and, even if we read him into the Grail Knight, or the timid man at the beginning of section two, or even the Hyacinth recieving man from section one, there is no real sense of his beloning or of being an elite - he seems utterly reduced and part of the desolation of The Wasteland - he, throughout his whole career was uncertain of everything - so, in a sense he was Elitist, given the tradition in which he belongs to and his own obsessions, but on the other hand - well it makes no difference anyway - he was no more Elitist than Tennyson or Keats or whomever else, it's just their images are far easier for us to understand, as we are more want to understand the metaphor of a nymph than we are of a promontory as in seen in Dry Salvages III for instance.
True, there is that, but there is also the bringing over of Sanskrit and Indic texts into poetic language - as for his essays, oh certainly, but the context they are written in would imply as such - the bulk of them to me seem written as food-money than anything else. And he does bring Milton back into his Canon in East Coker as well, and reconsider him.
Still, he wrote great poetry - elitist or not it doesn't matter, the same way it doesn't particularly matter how Antisemitic Wagner was, or how radically bigoted Ezra Pound was - they are both still great artists, and thankfully, time has passed to the point where we can see them as artists, rather than as political speakers.
JBI... I agree with Virgil that Eliot is an "elitist" as reverent of the canon as Bloom... yet this need need mean that he assumes an equal position for himself. Some artists... certainly Picasso, Wagner, ... and I suspect Dante, Virgil, Goethe are reverent of the canon... of the achievements of their predecessors and are equally certain of their own positions within that canon. Others may be just as innovative... and yet one doubts they ever really imagine that they themselves have equaled or even surpassed the achievement of those whom they revere. Was Van Gogh aware of his genius? Was Bach? Was Shakespeare?:confused:
Shakespeare would seem to think so - half his sonnets assume that they will be read forever at any rate.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
And yet while Shakespeare puts forth the effort to publish his "real" poetry, he doesn't give a second thought to his plays.:eek:
Oh, I suspect one can piece together traces of the same thing there - but even then - the Shakespeare voice seems more clouded in the plays than in the Sonnets - though the Sonnets arguably, like Sidney's Atrophil and Stella, assume a fictitious romantic plot.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
The question of elitism though - well, I find it hard to think of any poet before 1950 as anything but elitist - then again, it is hard to think of any poet as "humble" in that the art of poetry seems elitist in itself. Art to me seems fundamentally elitist, in that the artist, as expression, must value their own work as to think it presentable to an audience.
Certainly art is "elitist" to a great extent... and still is. There is a definite degree of ego involved in thinking that what one has to say through whatever artistic means is worthy of consideration. "Serious" artists also tend to think of an "elite" audience... not unlike themselves: an audience that is well read... educated... experienced. With a figure like Bach I imagine that he recognized his own mastery of his craft and professionalism... he was after all from a family of professional musicians. He must have had a certain degree of self-assuredness... but did he really fathom just how great his achievements were... especially as his work never achieved great acclaim... not even in his local parish...? Especially as the music he composed began to appear increasingly old-fashioned?
He does bring back Milton. I imagine Eliot in his later years feeling guilty over some of his exclusions. I don't really know that, just a feeling. I've never read an Eliot biography and so recently bought one and plan to read it in the coming months.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
The Shakespeare sonnets do have some sort of a narrative, so they may well be fictional. However a lot of them are about the same thing (he does repeat the fact that his words are immortal many times).Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
There are similarities in the plays- Taming of The Shrew is practically an earlier version of Much Ado.