The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] (1922) is a revolutionary, highly influential 434-line[B]

modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. 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
(its last line) the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih."[C]

Composition history

Writing

Eliot probably worked on what was to become The Waste Land for several years
preceding its first publication in 1922. In a letter to New York lawyer and patron of
modernism John Quinn dated 9 May 1921, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in
mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish."[1]

Richard Aldington, in his 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."[2]

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 there, 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.[3] 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.

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.[D] Upon Quinn's death they were
inherited by his sister, 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 was not until April 1968 that the existence and whereabouts of the manuscript
drafts were made known to Valerie Eliot, the poet's second wife and widow.[4] In
1971, Faber and Faber published a "facsimile and transcript" of the original drafts,
edited and annotated by Valerie Eliot. The full poem prior to the Pound editorial
changes is contained in the facsimile.

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 Ezra
Pound's suggested changes, although Eliot himself is also responsible for removing
large sections.

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 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.[5] 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.

Title

Eliot originally considered titling the poem He do the Police in Different Voices[15].
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 this title. 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." 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 wounding of the Fisher King and the subsequent
sterility of his lands. 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 as "Waste Land" (as used by Weston) or
"Wasteland", dropping the article. However, in a letter to Ezra Pound, Eliot
politely insisted that the title include the article.[16]

Structure
The epigraph and dedication to The Waste Land showing some of the languages
that Eliot used in the poem: Latin, Greek, English and Italian.

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 of Cumae
hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she
replied I want to die."

Following the epigraph is a dedication (added in a 1925 republication) that reads

"For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro" Here Eliot is both quoting line 117 of Canto
XXVI of Dante's Purgatorio, the second cantica of The Divine Comedy, where
Dante defines the troubadour Arnaldo Daniello as "the best smith of the mother
tongue" and also Pound's title of chapter 2 of his The Spirit of Romance (1910)
where he translated the phrase as "the better craftsman."[17] 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. [18]

The five parts of The Waste Land are entitled:

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)[citation needed].

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.[G] 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[citation needed].

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.

T. S. ELIOT

Analysis

Eliot attributed a great deal of his early style to the French Symbolists--
Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Laforgue--whom he first encountered
in college, in a book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist Movement in
Literature. It is easy to understand why a young aspiring poet would want to
imitate these glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect on his
poetry is perhaps less profound than he claimed. While he took from them
their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism while maintaining a
sensuousness of language, Eliot also developed a great deal that was new
and original. His early works, like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and
The Waste Land, draw on a wide range of cultural reference to depict a
modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply meaningful.
Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points
without having to argue them explicitly. As Ezra Pound once famously said,
Eliot truly did "modernize himself." In addition to showcasing a variety of
poetic innovations, Eliot's early poetry also develops a series of characters
who fit the type of the modern man as described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner,
and others of Eliot's contemporaries. The title character of "Prufrock" is a
perfect example: solitary, neurasthenic, overly intellectual, and utterly
incapable of expressing himself to the outside world.

As Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his

poetry changed. The later poems emphasize depth of analysis over
breadth of allusion; they simultaneously become more hopeful in tone:
Thus, a work such as Four Quartets explores more philosophical territory
and offers propositions instead of nihilism. The experiences of living in
England during World War II inform the Quartets, which address issues of
time, experience, mortality, and art. Rather than lamenting the ruin of
modern culture and seeking redemption in the cultural past, as The Waste
Land does, the quartets offer ways around human limits through art and
spirituality. The pastiche of the earlier works is replaced by philosophy and
logic, and the formal experiments of his early years are put aside in favor of
a new language consciousness, which emphasizes the sounds and other
physical properties of words to create musical, dramatic, and other subtle
effects.

However, while Eliot's poetry underwent significance transformations over

the course of his career, his poems also bear many unifying aspects: all of
Eliot's poetry is marked by a conscious desire to bring together the
intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that both honors the
past and acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own
efforts, and he frequently comments on his poetic endeavors in the poems
themselves. This humility, which often comes across as melancholy, makes
Eliot's some of the most personal, as well as the most intellectually
satisfying, poetry in the English language.