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The Waste Land

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera

   The Waste Land ( 1922), sometimes mistakenly written as The Wasteland,
   is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It is
   perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the 20th
   century. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem – its shifts between
   satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker,
   location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast
   and dissonant range of cultures and literatures – the poem has
   nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among
   its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line);
   "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and the Sanskrit "Shantih
   shantih shantih (its last line)."

Composition history

Writing

   Eliot probably started work on what was to become The Waste Land late
   in 1920 or early in 1921. On 7 February 1921, Wyndham Lewis told Sydney
   Schiff that he had seen a new long poem of Eliot's, in four parts, and
   marking a new departure in style. In May of that year, Eliot told John
   Quinn that he wanted to finish a long poem that was still incomplete.

   Richard Aldington in his book of memoirs relates that "a year or so"
   before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London,
   Eliot visited him in the country. While walking through a graveyard,
   they started discussing Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country
   Churchyard. Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot
   admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a
   contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was,
   would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a
   similar success." (p.261).

   Eliot, having been diagnosed with some form of nervous disorder, had
   been recommended rest, and applied for three months' leave from the
   bank where he was employed; the reason stated on his staff card was
   "nervous breakdown." He and his wife Vivien travelled to the coastal
   resort of Margate for a period of convalescence. While here Eliot
   worked on the poem, and possibly showed an early version to Ezra Pound
   when, after a brief return to London, the Eliots travelled to Paris in
   November 1921 and were guests of Pound. Eliot was en route to Lausanne,
   Switzerland, for treatment by Doctor Roger Vittoz, who had been
   recommended to him by Ottoline Morrell; Vivien was to stay at a
   sanatorium just outside Paris. In Lausanne, Eliot produced a 19-page
   version of the poem. He returned from Lausanne in early January 1922.
   Pound then made detailed editorial comments and significant cuts to the
   manuscript. Eliot would later dedicate the poem to Pound, referring to
   him as "il miglior fabbro," Italian for "the better craftsman." The
   expression goes back to Dante, who used it in the Divine Comedy
   referring to the Provençal troubador Arnaut Daniel (praised by Pound as
   being the greatest of poets).

The manuscript drafts

   Eliot sent the manuscript drafts of the poem to John Quinn in October
   1922; they reached Quinn in New York in January 1923. On Quinn's death
   they were inherited by his daughter, Julia Anderson. Years later, in
   the early 1950s, Mrs Anderson's daughter, Mary Conroy, found the
   documents in storage. In 1958 she sold them privately to the New York
   Public Library. It wasn't until April 1968 that the existence and
   whereabouts of the manuscript drafts was made known to Valerie Eliot,
   the poet's second wife and widow.

   In 1971, Faber and Faber published a "facsimile and transcript" of the
   original drafts. This work was edited and annotated by Valerie Eliot.

Editing

   Ezra Pound in 1913. In 1922 he helped Eliot with the editing of The
   Waste Land.
   Ezra Pound in 1913. In 1922 he helped Eliot with the editing of The
   Waste Land.

   The drafts of the poem reveal that it originally contained almost twice
   as much material as the final published version. The significant cuts
   are in part due to Ezra Pound's suggested changes, although Eliot
   himself is also responsible for removing large sections.

   In the version of the poem Eliot brought back from Switzerland, the
   first two sections of the poem – 'The Burial of the Dead' and 'A Game
   of Chess' – appeared under the heading He Do the Police in Different
   Voices (parts 1 and 2). This strange phrase is taken from Charles
   Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend, in which the widow Betty Higden, says
   of her adopted foundling son Sloppy: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy
   is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different
   voices."

   The now famous opening lines of the poem – 'April is the cruellest
   month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, ...' – did not appear
   until the top of the second page of the typescript. The first page of
   the typescript contained 54 lines in the sort of street voice that we
   hear again at the end of the second section, 'A Game of Chess'. This
   page appears to have been lightly crossed out in pencil by Eliot
   himself.

   Although there are several signs of similar adjustments made by Eliot,
   and a number of significant comments by Vivien, the most significant
   editorial input is clearly that of Ezra Pound, who recommended many
   cuts to the poem.

   'The typist home at teatime' section was originally in entirely regular
   stanzas of iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of abab – the same
   form as Gray's Elegy, which was in Eliot's thoughts around this time.
   Pound's note against this section of the draft is "verse not
   interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it". In the end, the
   regularity of the four-line stanzas was abandoned.

   At the beginning of 'The Fire Sermon' in one version, there was a
   lengthy section in heroic couplets, in imitation of Alexander Pope's
   The Rape of the Lock. It described one lady Fresca (who appeared in the
   earlier poem "Gerontion"). As Richard Ellmann describes it, "Instead of
   making her toilet like Pope's Belinda, Fresca is going to it, like
   Joyce's Bloom." The lines read:

          Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool,
          Fresca slips softly to the needful stool,
          Where the pathetic tale of Richardson
          Eases her labour till the deed is done . . .

   Ellmann notes "Pound warned Eliot that since Pope had done the couplets
   better, and Joyce the defecation, there was no point in another round."

   Pound also excised some shorter poems that Eliot wanted to insert
   between the five sections. One of these, that Eliot had entitled
   'Dirge', begins

          Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
          Under the flatfish and the squids.

          Graves' Disease in a dead Jew's eyes!
          Where the crabs have eat the lids
          . . .

   At the request of Eliot's wife, Vivien, a line in the A Game of Chess
   section was removed from the poem: "And we shall play a game of
   chess/The ivory men make company between us/Pressing lidless eyes and
   waiting for a knock upon the door". This section is apparently based on
   their marital life, and she may have felt these lines too revealing.
   The "ivory men" line must have meant something to Eliot though; in
   1960, thirteen years after Vivien's death, he inserted the line in a
   copy made for sale to aid the London Library.

   In a late December 1921 letter to Eliot to celebrate the "birth" of the
   poem Pound wrote a bawdy poem of 48 lines entitled "Sage Homme" in
   which he identified Eliot as the mother of the poem but compared
   himself to the midwife. Some of the verses are:

          E. P. hopeless and unhelped
          Enthroned in the marmorean skies
          His verse omits realities,
          Angelic hands with mother of pearl
          Retouch the strapping servant girl,
          ...
          Balls and balls and balls again
          Can not touch his fellow men.
          His foaming and abundant cream
          Has coated his world. The coat of a dream;
          Or say that the upjut of sperm
          Has rendered his sense pachyderm.

Publishing history

   The poem was first published, without the author's notes, in the first
   issue (October 1922) of The Criterion, a literary magazine started and
   edited by Eliot. The first appearance of the poem in the US was in the
   November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine (actually published in late
   October). In December 1922, The Waste Land was published in the US in
   book form by Boni and Liveright, the first publication to print the
   notes. In September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by
   Eliot's friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book
   edition of The Waste Land in an edition of about 450 copies, the type
   handset by Virginia Woolf.

The title

   Eliot originally considered titling the poem He do the Police in
   Different Voices, an allusion to Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend
   where Mrs. Betty Higden describes how Sloppy reads the newspaper aloud.
   This would help the reader to understand that, while there are many
   different voices (speakers) in the poem, there is one central
   consciousness. What was lost by the rejection of this title Eliot might
   have felt compelled to restore by commenting on the commonalities of
   his characters in his note about Tiresias.

   In the end, the title Eliot chose was The Waste Land. In his first note
   to the poem he attributes the title to Jessie L. Weston's book on the
   Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance. The allusion is to the sexual
   wounding of the Fisher King and the sympathetic sterility of his lands
   that is caused. To restore the King and make his lands fertile again
   the Grail questor must ask "What ails you?"

   The poem's title is often mistakenly given in two ways: "Waste Land" is
   shortened to "Wasteland" and "The" is omitted. "Waste Land" as two
   capitalized words comes from Weston's usage and, in a letter to Ezra
   Pound, Eliot politely insisted that the title include the word "The."

Structure

   The epigraph and dedication to The Waste Land.
   The epigraph and dedication to The Waste Land.

   The poem is preceded by a Latin and Greek epigraph from The Satyricon
   of Petronius. In English, it reads: "I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl
   at Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said, Sibyl, what do you
   want? she replied I want to die." (Petronius cast the question and
   answer in Greek).

   Following the epigraph is a dedication (added in a 1925 republication)
   that reads "For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro" ("the best craftsman",
   literally "blacksmith", quoting line 117 of canto XXVI of Dante's
   Purgatorio, the second cantica of The Divine Comedy, where Dante so
   defines the troubadour Arnaldo Daniello), who helped Eliot revise the
   poem significantly. This dedication was originally written in ink by
   Eliot in the 1922 Boni & Liveright paperback edition of the poem
   presented to Pound; it was subsequently included in future editions.

   The five sections of The Waste Land are:
    1. The Burial of the Dead
    2. A Game of Chess
    3. The Fire Sermon
    4. Death by Water
    5. What the Thunder Said

   The first four sections of the poem correspond to the Greek classical
   elements of Earth (burial), Air (voices – the draft title for this
   section was "In the Cage", an image of hanging in air; also, the
   element of Air is generally thought to be aligned with the intellect
   and the mind), Fire (passion), and Water (the draft of the poem had
   additional water imagery in a fishing voyage.) The title of the fifth
   section could be a reference to the fifth element of Aether, which is
   included in many mystical traditions (one line here mentions aetherial
   rumours.)

   The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes, purporting
   to explain his metaphors, references, and allusions. Some of these
   notes are helpful in interpreting the poem, but some are arguably even
   more puzzling, and many of the most opaque passages are left
   unannotated. The notes were added after Eliot's publisher requested
   something longer to justify printing "The Waste Land" in a separate
   book, and many scholars think the notes are peppered with red herrings.

   There is some question as to whether Eliot originally intended The
   Waste Land to be a collection of individual poems (additional poems
   were supplied to Pound for his comments on including them) or to be
   considered one poem with five sections.

Style

   The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot's interest in
   exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue. This interest dates
   back at least as far as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

   Eliot also enjoyed the music hall, and something of the flavour of this
   popular form of entertainment gets into the poem. It follows the
   pattern of the musical fugue, in which many voices enter throughout the
   piece re-stating the themes.

   Above all perhaps it is the disjointed nature of the poem, the way it
   jumps from one adopted manner to another, the way it moves between
   different voices and makes use of phrases in foreign languages, that is
   the most distinctive feature of the poem's style. Interestingly, at the
   same time as Eliot was writing The Waste Land, Robert Bridges was
   working on the first of his Neo-Miltonic Syllabics, a poem called '
   Poor Poll', which also includes lines in several different languages.

Critical reception

   The poem's initial reception was mixed; though many hailed its
   portrayal of universal despair and ingenious technique, others, such as
   F. L. Lucas, detested the poem from the first, while Charles Powell
   commented "so much waste paper". Edmund Wilson's influential piece for
   The New Republic, "The Poetry of Drought," which many critics have
   noted is unusually generous in arguing that the poem has an effective
   cohesive structure, emphasizes autobiographical and emotional elements:

   “    Not only is life sterile and futile, but men have tasted its
      sterility and futility a thousand times before. T. S. Eliot, walking
     the desert of London, feels profoundly that the desert has always been
     there. Like Tiresias, he has sat below the wall of Thebes; like Buddha,
     he has seen the world as an arid conflagration; like the Sibyl, he has
                 known everything and known everything in vain.             ”

   Critic Harold Bloom has observed that the forerunners for 'The Waste
   Land' are Alfred Lord Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama and particularly
   Walt Whitman's majestic elegy, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
   Bloom'd. The major images of Eliot's poem are found in Whitman's ode:
   the lilacs that begin Eliot's poem, the "unreal city", the duplication
   of the self, the "dear brother", the "murmur of maternal lamentation",
   the image of faces peering at us, and the hermit thrush's song.

Allusions in "The Burial of the Dead"

   "The Burial of the Dead" serves as the title of Eliot's first section
   and is an allusion to The Book of Common Prayer, the prayer book of the
   Anglican Church.

   The second section of "The Burial of the Dead" shifts from the voice of
   the powerless Marie and becomes the voice of the narrator. The first
   twelve lines of this section include three Old Testament allusions, and
   the narrator finds himself in a summer drought that has transformed the
   land into a desert. He is referred to as the "Son of man" which is a
   title used of Ezekiel, who was called upon by God to warn Israel to
   repent of their idolatry. God finally tells Ezekiel that Israel will
   not change; therefore, their altars will be desolate, images broken,
   and their cities will lay in waste. Also, in the book of Ecclesiastes,
   God warns the Jewish people that they should remember the days of their
   youth, for in their old age "fears shall be in the way" and "then shall
   the dust return to the earth as it was" (Authorized King James Version,
   Ezekiel 6:4, Ecclesiastes 12:5-7). Gish analyzes these allusions by
   writing, "Dead land, broken images, fear and dust, all take on the
   significance of human failure" (50). After such a depressing sequence
   of events, the narrator is offered shelter under a mysterious "red
   rock" which is an allusion to Isaiah's reference to the coming Messiah
   who will be "as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a
   great rock in a weary land" (Authorized King James Version, Isaiah
   32:2).

   The crowd marches in the "Unreal city" under the fog of a winter's
   dawn. There are so many people that the narrator exclaims, "I had not
   thought death had undone so many" (63). This verse is a direct allusion
   to Dante's Inferno and the people that he witnessed in the vestibule of
   Hell. Dante writes, "An interminable train of souls pressed on, so many
   that I wondered how death could have undone so many" (3.55-57). Dante,
   describing one in the crowd whom he recognizes, writes, "I saw the
   shade of the one who must have been the coward who made the great
   refusal" (3.59-60). The "great refusal" that Dante refers to is the
   lack of choosing either good or evil. They have died without ever
   living; furthermore, they may not enter either Hell or Heaven since
   they made no choice in life to be virtuous or to sin.

Also Look

   Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance by HP Lovecraft

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