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Loading... The Waste Land (1922)by T. S. Eliot
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While I liked all the classical references (and Tiresias was familiar to me, having just recently reread Oedipus Rex!), I didn't really understand this poem. However, the rhyme and meter are enjoyable so I will be trying this again! ( ) The Waste Land is a poem to be studied rather than read, analysed rather than enjoyed, and this fact will already put it firmly into the debit column for many readers. T. S. Eliot apparently had a theory that 'poetry can communicate before it is understood', and certainly you get this from The Waste Land: the sense of foreboding and cataclysm, and of disharmony and then harmony, synergy, comes through to you even if you do not have a clue what is going on. Eliot chooses his words well and there is a wealth of allusion hinting at an unspoken metaphysical layer. There is a Pandora's box of dark potential in Eliot's piece, like an atom that could be split with explosive power, and while you might well prefer Stephen King or Marian Keyes (and more power to you), I for one am glad that there are complex artistic contraptions like The Waste Land in the world. I can't help it, I have always loved T.S. Eliot's diction and modes of expression. Now I have it in e-book form. I know Thomas Stearns isn't the best model for human behavior, but he surely could express himself. This poem, an elegy, a summoning of Buddhist and Christian traditions, a description of the ruptures of civilization, couldn't be more timely.
I will take a brief look at Consider Phlebas and then at The Waste Land, followed by examples of how the latter informs the former. Eliot was to tell the Paris Review that in the composition of the closing sections "I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying." There seems no reason at all why we should not take him at his word. Defensive modesty of this variety can often be worth noting; what critic has ever succeeded in getting any sense or any beauty out of the final pages? And in what conceivable universe—even the batty, sinister one of Ezra Pound, who insisted that the poem open in that manner—is April the cruelest month? It is not disputable that by publishing The Waste Land when he did, Eliot caught something of the zeitgeist and enthralled those who needed borrowed words and concepts to capture or re-express the desolation of Europe after 1918... It is certainly the most overrated poem in the Anglo-American canon. Look at it as a film scenario, which in many ways it resembles, and you can see that it goes much farther – with its jump cuts and flashes backward and forward and montages and intense economy – than anything by Truffaut or Godard or Fellini or Antonioni.... The twentieth century has seen bigger and more ambitious poems than The Waste Land – such as the Cantos of Pound, the Anathemata of David Jones, the Anabase of St-John Perse – but no poem has been a more miraculous mediator between the hermetic and demotic. It is, curiously when one considers the weight of polyglot learning it carries, essentially a popular poem, outgoing rather than ingrown, closer to Shakespeare than to Donne. It was Pound who said that music decays when it moves too far away from the dance, and poetry decays when it neglects to sing. The Waste Land sticks in one’s mind like a diverse recital performed by a voice of immense variety but essentially a single organ: it sings and goes on singing. Is contained inHas the adaptationWas inspired byHas as a reference guide/companionHas as a studyHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guideDistinctionsNotable Lists
"Eliot's unique power, his understanding of interrelated beauty and squalor, freshness and despair, survives academic fashions, survives all interpretations, survives even his own dicta and formulations. He is one of the great poets." --Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate and author of Singing School "An exalted nightmare, one of the great poems of the 20th century." --Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry) and A Poet's Glossary No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsFolio Society -- The Waste Land LE -- Review in Fine Press Forum LE: The Wasteland - T.S. Eliot in Folio Society Devotees Popular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)821.912Literature English & Old English literatures English poetry 1900- 1900-1999 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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