The Connell Guide to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
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The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is not far from a century old, and it has still not been surpassed as the most famous of all modern poems. In many ways, it continues to define what we mean by modern whenever we begin to speak about modern verse. At the same time, as Ted Hughes once observed, it is also genuinely popular, and not just among the cogniscenti or the degree-bearing. “I remember when I taught fourteen-year-old boys in a secondary modern school,” Hughes once said, “of all the poetry I introduced them to, their favourite was The Waste Land.” Not for nothing was it included, in its entirety, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), edited by Philip Larkin, a poet not known otherwise for his hospitality to modernism. The poem’s appeal is intellectual, certainly, but also visceral. It fulfils in miniature the demands that Eliot made of the great poet at large: “abundance, variety, and complete competence” – the first of those criteria of greatness all the more surprising, and moving, to find accomplished in a poem that has its starting place in so barren a human territory. The poetry is modern in a wholly self-conscious way, but the modernity of Eliot’s poem stems in large part from a strikingly powerful awareness of what’s past. In this book, the Oxford scholar Seamus Perry points out some of the fruits of that acute historical awareness – and shares his own admiration of, and pleasure in, the extraordinary voicings and counter-voicings of this perpetually great work.
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This is the book I have been looking for.
Every year, in April, I read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land because I like the line “April is the cruelest month.” However, around the time that I get to Marie sledding with Freddie I find myself confused and lost. I understand that The Waste Land is regularly described as the most important poem of the twentieth century, but I annually fail to see how this confusing stewpot of images and phrases managed to earn that title.
This book provides the background to appreciate the poem. For example, I learned that the point of The Waste Land is its fractured and abrupt change in the voice narrating or constituting the elements of the poem. Thus, the voice talking about April is not the same voice as the voice that talks about sledding down the mountain. As the author, Seamus Perry, points out Eliot's original title was “He do the police in different voices,” which was taken from a comment about her child reading different newspaper stories in different voices. So, I take it that, in a way, Eliot's point was that modernity is fractured and comes at its inhabitants from all angles.
That is an important point for an appreciation of the poem. The problem I had with the poem was the point of the poem. With that in mind, I think I have a better understanding of how to read The Waste Land as constituent units of different voices.
Further, Perry does a wonderful job of providing background information on the poem. I find it interesting that so much background information is required to truly appreciate the poem, which is not to say that the poem cannot be appreciated without that understanding, but the appreciation becomes deeper with more knowledge. For example, while the line about “April is the cruelest month” is nifty, I had not appreciated Eliot's reversal of normal values by describing the land's return to life in a negative way.
Perry provides substantial insights about other passages in the poem, which insights are invaluable.
For myself, I think I picked up one by my recent reading of [[ASIN:B004IYJEB0 Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization]]. In that book, I reflected on the description of Rome's imposition of a “Carthaginian Peace” on its former rival, which virtually guaranteed the next round of war. Eliot makes several references to Carthage in his poem, which makes me wonder if Eliot wasn't channeling the thinking - the guilt - that Germany had been subjected to a Carthaginian Peace and that Europe would see future wars as a result.
Is my interpretation correct? I don't know, but part of a great work of art is that it is open to interpretation and re-interpretation.
If you are struggling with The Waste Land, then this is a book that will interest you.
