The Waste Land and Other Poems (14 page)

Eliot’s criticism, like his poetry, is not to everyone’s liking. The title of Delmore Schwartz’s essay ‘The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot’ (1949) demonstrates the resentment many readers have felt concerning the prominence of Eliot’s ideas. Echoing William Carlos Williams and Delmore Schwartz, Harold Bloom notes in
The Western Canon,
‘I began my teaching career nearly forty years ago in an academic context dominated by the ideas of T. S. Eliot; ideas that roused me to fury, and against which I fought as vigorously as I could.’

Eliot’s influence threatens to predominate the new English.

—from a letter to Gorham Munson (October 13, 1920)

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

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)

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)

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)

I think of [Eliot] as satirist rather than poet.

—from
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
(1936)

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)

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)

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)

‘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)

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?

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S.
Eliot: An Imperfect Life.
London: Vintage, 1998. Exhaustive and highly regarded study of Eliot’s life and career.

Asher, Kenneth.
T. S. Eliot and Ideology.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Demonstrates the effect of politics on Eliot’s work, with attention to the influence of French reactionary thinking.

Brooker, Jewel Spears.
Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Analyzes modernism as a cultural and literary phenomenon and as an ideology, focusing on Eliot and his relations to Mallarmé, Hulme, Yeats, and Joyce.

Bush, Ronald.
T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Argues that Eliot’s character was torn by the same conflict that charged his poetry—an intense tension between romantic yearning and intellectual detachment.

Chinitz, David.
T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Examines Eliot’s engagement with popular culture, such as American jazz, and finds that his attitude toward such culture is surprisingly less hostile than has been generally assumed.

Julius, Anthony.
T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form.
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003. Controversial study of Eliot’s deployment of anti-Semitic discourse and the role it played in his literary works.

Kenner, Hugh.
The Invisible Poet.
1959. New York: Harcourt, 1969. An old but classic account of Eliot’s career, by one of the liveliest writers in the field.

Malamud, Randy.
The Language of Modernism.
Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989. Explains why modernist literature looks the way it does, and how readers may learn to understand the language, style, and tropes of Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce.

Menand, Louis.
Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1992. Intellectual history of Eliot and the role he played in the rise of literary modernism.