Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader
with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions
that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled
from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works,
letters written by the author, literary criticism of later
generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’
histories. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to
filter T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems through a
variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of
these enduring works.
Comments
HART CRANE
Eliot’s influence threatens to predominate the
new English.
—from a letter to Gorham Munson (October 13,
1920)
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Mr. Eliot’s poem is also a collection of
flashes, but there is no effect of heterogeneity, since all these
flashes are relevant to the same thing and together give what seems
to be a complete expression of this poet’s vision of modern life.
We have here range, depth, and beautiful expression. What more is
necessary to a great poem? This vision is singularly complex and in
all its labyrinths utterly sincere. It is the mystery of life that
it shows two faces, and we know of no other modern poet who can
more adequately and movingly reveal to us the inextricable tangle
of the sordid and the beautiful that make up life. Life is neither
hellish nor heavenly; it has a purgatorial quality. And since it is
purgatory, deliverance is possible. Students of Mr. Eliot’s work
will find a new note, and a profoundly interesting one, in the
latter part of his poem. October 26, 1922
—October 26, 1922
GILBERT SELDES
In essence ‘The Waste Land’ says something which
is not new: that life has become barren and sterile, that man is
withering, impotent, and without assurance that the waters which
made the land fruitful will ever rise again. (I need not say that
‘thoughtful’ as the poem is, it does not ‘express an idea’; it
deals with emotions, and ends precisely in that significant
emotion, inherent in the poem, which Mr. Eliot has described.) The
title, the plan, and much of the symbolism of the poem, the author
tells us in his ‘Notes,’ were suggested by Miss Weston’s remarkable
book on the Grail legend, ‘From Ritual to Romance’ ; it is only
indispensable to know that there exists the legend of a king
rendered impotent, and his country sterile, both awaiting
deliverance by a knight on his way to seek the Grail; it is
interesting to know further that this is part of the Life or
Fertility mysteries; but the poem is self-contained. It seems at
first sight remarkably disconnected, confused, the emotion seems to
disengage itself in spite of the objects and events chosen by the
poet as their vehicle....
A closer view of the poem does more than
illuminate the difficulties ; it reveals the hidden form of the
work, indicates how each thing falls into place, and to the
reader’s surprise shows that the emotion which at first seemed to
come in spite of the framework and the detail could not otherwise
have been communicated. For the theme is not a distaste for life,
nor is it a disillusion, a romantic pessimism of any kind. It is
specifically concerned with the idea of the Waste Land—that the
land was fruitful and now is not, that life had been rich,
beautiful, assured, organized, lofty, and now is dragging itself
out in a poverty-stricken, and disrupted and ugly tedium, without
health, and with no consolation in morality; there may remain for
the poet the labor of poetry, but in the poem there remain only
‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’—the broken
glimpses of what was. The poem is not an argument and I can only
add, to be fair, that it contains no romantic idealization of the
past; one feels simply that even in the cruelty and madness which
have left their record in history and in art, there was an
intensity of life, a germination and fruitfulness, which are now
gone, and that even the creative imagination, even hallucination
and vision have atrophied, so that water shall never again be
struck from a rock in the desert. Mr. Bertrand Russell has recently
said that since the Renaissance the clock of Europe has been
running down; without the feeling that it was once wound up,
without the contrasting emotions as one looks at the past and at
the present, ‘The Waste Land’ would be a different poem, and the
problem of the poem would have been solved another way.
—from The Nation (December 6, 1922)
EDMUND WILSON
Mr. Eliot is a poet. It is true his poems seem
the products of a constricted emotional experience and that he
appears to have drawn rather heavily on books for the heat he could
not derive from life. There is a certain grudging margin, to be
sure, about all that Mr. Eliot writes—as if he were compensating
himself for his limitations by a peevish assumption of superiority.
But it is the very acuteness of his suffering from his starvation
which gives such poignancy to his art. And, as I say, Mr. Eliot is
a poet—that is, he feels intensely and with distinction and speaks
naturally in beautiful verse—so that, no matter within what walls
he lives, he belongs to the divine company. His verse is sometimes
much too scrappy—he does not dwell long enough upon one idea to
give it its proportionate value before passing to the next—but
these drops, though they be wrung from flint, are none the less
authentic crystals. They are broken and sometimes infinitely tiny,
but they are worth all the rhinestones on the market. I doubt
whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a
contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a
mastery of English verse. The poem is—in spite of its lack of
structural unity—simply one triumph after another—from the white
April light of the opening and the sweet wistfulness of the
nightingale passage—one of the only successful pieces of
contemporary blank verse—to the shabby sadness of the Thames
Maidens, the cruel irony of Tiresias’ vision, and the dry grim
stony style of the descriptions of the Waste Land itself.
That is why Mr. Eliot’s trivialities are more
valuable than other people’s epics—why Mr. Eliot’s detestation of
Sweeney is more precious than Mr. Sandburg’s sympathy for him, and
Mr. Prufrock’s tea-table tragedy more important than all the
passions of the New Adam—sincere and carefully expressed as these
latter emotions indubitably are. That is also why, for all its
complicated correspondences and its recondite references and
quotations, The Waste Land is intelligible at first reading.
It is not necessary to know anything about the Grail Legend or any
but the most obvious of Mr. Eliot’s allusions to feel the force of
the intense emotion which the poem is intended to convey—as one
cannot do, for example, with the extremely ill-focused Eight
Cantos of his imitator Mr. Ezra Pound, who presents only a
bewildering mosaic with no central emotion to provide a key. In
Eliot the very images and the sound of the words—even when we do
not know precisely why he has chosen them—are charged with a
strange poignancy which seems to bring us into the heart of a
singer. And sometimes we feel that he is speaking not only for a
personal distress, but for the starvation of a whole
civilization—for people grinding at barren office-routine in the
cells of gigantic cities, drying up their souls in eternal toil
whose products never bring them profit, where their pleasures are
so vulgar and so feeble that they are almost sadder than their
pains. It is our whole world of strained nerves and shattered
institutions, in which ‘some infinitely gentle, infinitely
suffering thing’ is somehow being done to death—in which the maiden
Philomel ‘by the barbarous king so rudely forced’ can no longer
even fill the desert ‘with inviolable voice.’ It is the world in
which the pursuit of grace and beauty is something which is felt to
be obsolete—the reflections which reach us from the past cannot
illumine so dingy a scene; that heroic prelude has ironic echoes
among the streets and the drawing-rooms where we live. Yet the race
of the poets—though grown rarer—is not yet quite dead: there is at
least one who, as Mr. Pound says, has brought a new personal rhythm
into the language and who has lent even to the words of the great
predecessors a new music and a new meaning.
—from The Dial (December 1922)
CONRAD AIKEN
In ‘The Waste Land,’ Mr. Eliot’s sense of the
literary past has become so overmastering as almost to constitute
the motive of the work. It is as if, in conjunction with Mr. Pound
of the ‘Cantos,’ he wanted to make a ‘literature of literature’—a
poetry not more actuated by life itself than by poetry.
—from the New Republic (February 7,
1923)
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I think of [Eliot] as satirist rather than
poet.
—from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
(1936)
RALPH ELLISON
Wuthering Heights had caused me an agony
of inexpressible emotion and the same was true of Jude the
Obscure, but The Waste Land seized my mind. I was intrigued by
its power to move me while eluding my understanding. Somehow its
rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the
Negro poets, and even though I could not understand then, its range
of allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis
Armstrong.
—from Shadow and Act (1964)
ROBERT FROST
Eliot and I have our similarities and our
differences. We are both poets and we both like to play. That’s the
similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre. He likes
to play Eucharist.
—from The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis
Untermeyer (1963)
R. W. B. LEWIS
Edith Wharton found ... [Pru frock]
extremely ‘amusing’ ... but relatively insignificant and
interesting mainly as revealing the influence of Whitman.... The
Waste Land ... seemed to her to lack even the enlivening
presence of Walt Whitman; it was a poem, like Joyce’s novel
[Ulysses] ridden by theory rather than warmed by life.
-R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton
(1975)
JOHN BERRYMAN
‘Like a patient etherised upon a table ...’ With
this line, modern
poetry begins. —from The Freedom of the
Poet (1976)
—from The Freedom of the Poet (1976)
Questions
1. (a) The Waste Land poses a God-awful
present against a wonderful past. (b) The Waste Land depicts
a past as awful as the present. (c) The Waste Land is not a
poem about how things are or were, but a poem about perspective,
about how the present sees itself and the past. Which of these
assertions is closest to the truth?
2. How would you characterize the depiction of
sex (or love or the relations between the sexes) in The Waste
Land?
3. Do Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land
strike you as a put-on, as showing off, as genuinely
informative, as typical of Eliot’s pedantic personality, as
all these at once?
4. How is Madame Sosostris related to anything
else in the poem? Ask yourself the same question about Phlebas the
Phoenician.
5. It is often said that The Waste Land is
a crucial event in the ‘Modernist’ movement, and that its methods
and interests are the literary equivalent of methods and interests
in the works of, say, Picasso and Stravinsky. From what you know
about these other artists, is this categorization of Eliot’s work
valid?