The Waste Land
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The Waste Land (sometimes mistakenly written as "The Wasteland") is a highly influential 433-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the 20th century, dealing with the decline of civilization and the impossibility of recovering meaning in life. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegaic 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 cruelest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and "Shantih shantih shantih" (its last line).
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Composition history
Writing
Eliot probably started work on the poem that was to become The Waste Land late in 1920 or early in 1921. On 7 February, 1921, Wyndham Lewis told Sidney 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 the Pounds. Eliot was en route to Lausanne, Switzerland, for treatment from a Doctor Vittoz, who had been recommended to him by Ottoline Morrell; Vivien herself 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".
Many critics have suggested that the composition of "The Waste Land" rather closely mirrors the early chapters of James Joyce's "Ulysses" in terms of thematics and imagery. Joyce himself considered Eliot nothing short of a plagiarist . He commemorates his impression of Eliot by refering to him as 'ildiot' in "Finnegan's Wake."
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 1950's, 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.
Editing
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 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 London 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 . . ."
Ellman 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, 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, after his wife's death, he inserted the line in a copy made for sale to aid the London Library.
Pound wrote a bawdy poem in a letter to Eliot to celebrate the "birth" of the poem:
- 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.
Structure
Image:TheWasteLandEpigraph.jpg
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 better craftsman), 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 sections of The Waste Land are:
- The Burial of the Dead
- A Game of Chess
- The Fire Sermon
- Death by Water
- 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), Fire (passion), and Water (the draft of the poem had additional water imagery in a fishing voyage.)
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.
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.
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.
Sources
Sources from which Eliot quotes or to which he alludes include the works of Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Gérard de Nerval, Thomas Kyd, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Joseph Conrad, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner, Oliver Goldsmith, Hermann Hesse, Paul Verlaine, Bram Stoker, and Aldous Huxley. Eliot also makes extensive use of Scriptural writings including the Bible, the Hindu Brihad-Aranyaka-Upanishad, and the Buddha's Fire Sermon, and of cultural and anthropological studies such as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (particularly its study of the Wasteland motif in Celtic mythology).
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".Template:Ref 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.
Bibliography
- Collected Poems: 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot
- The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound by T.S. Eliot, annotated and edited by Valerie Eliot. (Faber and Faber, 1971) ISBN 0-571-09635-2 (Paberback ISBN 0-571-11503-9 )
- A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot by B. C. Southam
- The Waste Land edited by Michael North
- Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, ISBN 0-446-69129-1
- Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, Hamish Hamilton, 1984, ISBN 0-349-10061-6
- Richard Aldington, Life for Life's Sake, The Viking Press, 1941
- Stanford, Donald E.: In the Classic Mode: The Achievement of Robert Bridges, Associated University Presses, 1978. ISBN 0-87413-118-9
Further reading
- T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land by James E. Miller Jr.
- The Waste Land: A Student's Companion to the Poem by Nancy Gish (the title of the British edition is The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire)
- T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land by Gareth Reeves (concentrates on the poetry)
Notes
- Charles Powell, writing as 'C.P.', in a review of The Waste Land first published in the Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1923, page 7, and reprinted in T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage (Volume 1, pages 194 – 195). Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1982