The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot’s modern epic turns 100

An inspired editing job by his friend Ezra Pound, another US literary expatriate, reduced the poem from around 800 to 434 lines, which helped to give it its fragmented and cryptic form. The result is a somewhat bewildering poem divided into five sections, some written in free verse, some in traditional forms, littered with allusions and quotations – to the Book of Ezekiel, Shakespeare, Dante, Hindu scripture, 1920s music hall songs, nursery rhymes. Eliot included source notes, which may or may not be a joke at the reader’s expense.

What’s it about?

Whole libraries have been written in response to this question. The poem is to some extent held together by a mythical subtext – a Grail legend, about a drought-stricken land with an impotent king, which must be returned to fertility. It clearly spoke to the crisis that followed the First World War, as well as the crisis in Eliot’s own life.

The critic I.A. Richards influentially praised The Waste Land for expressing a generation’s disillusionment: a “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed”.

Eliot himself later dismissed it as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life”, saying that it was “just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”.

How did it go down with readers?

Mainstream reviewers weren’t impressed. The Guardian called it “so much waste paper”, and Sir John Squire, an old-guard critic, said it was a poem for which “a grunt would serve equally well”. Eliot’s modernist associates, such as Virginia Woolf, were more effusive. Budding poets such as W.H. Auden were electrified, and it was a hit with young people between the Wars.

As George Orwell recalled, Eliot and his fellow modernists simply seemed “to be aesthetically alive” in a way that British writers hadn’t for decades. One young aesthete, Harold Acton, declaimed The Waste Land from his Oxford balcony through a megaphone, a scene that Evelyn Waugh later fictionalised in Brideshead Revisited.

How is it standing up today?

Eliot’s authority as a cultural arbiter is reduced today, in part because of his antisemitism and his politics. But The Waste Land remains as influential as ever: it tends to be seen less as a philosophical statement than as an appealingly vulnerable, personal poem about failed relationships and mental breakdown, threaded through with wounded female voices (the drafts show that Vivien was an important collaborator).

The poem is difficult but it is also genuinely popular: Ted Hughes noted that when he taught poetry at a secondary modern, it was the work his teenage pupils enjoyed most. Although it makes little surface sense, it has what Eliot called a strong “imaginative logic”. And thanks to his astonishing ear, it still sounds as enticingly mysterious and resonant as ever.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/arts-life/958834/the-waste-land-t-s-eliots-modern-epic-turns-100