The Waste Land

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The Waste Land (1922)^[1] is a highly influential 434-line^[2] 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 the Sanskrit "Shantih shantih shantih" (its last line).

Contents 1 Composition history 1.1 Writing 1.2 The manuscript drafts 1.3 Editing 2 Publishing history 3 The title 4 Structure 5 Style 6 Sources 7 Critical reception 8 Allusions in "The Burial of the Dead" 9 References in popular culture 10 Notes 11 Bibliography 11.1 Primary sources 11.2 Secondary sources 12 External links 12.1 The poem 12.2 Annotated versions 12.3 Recordings 12.4 Satires

[edit] Composition history

[edit] 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 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."^[3]

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."^[4]

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.^[5] 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.

[edit] The 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.^[6] 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.^[7] 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.

[edit] 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.^[8] 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.

[edit] Publishing history

Before the editing had even begun Eliot found a publisher.^[9] Horace Liveright of the New York publishing firm of Boni and Liveright was in Paris for a number of meetings with Ezra Pound. At a dinner on 3 January 1922 he made offers for works by Pound, James Joyce (Ulysses) and Eliot. Eliot was to get a royality of 15% for a book version of the poem planned for autumn publication.^[10]

To maximize his income and reach a broader audience, Eliot also sought a deal with magazines. Being the London correspondent for The Dial magazine^[11] and a college friend of its co-owner and co-editor, Scofield Thayer, the Dial was an ideal choice. Even though the Dial offered $150 (£34)^[12] for the poem (25% more than its standard rate) Eliot was offended that a year's work would be valued so low, especially since another contributor was found to have been given an exceptional compensation for a short story.^[13] The deal with the Dial almost fell through (other magazines considered were the Little Review and Vanity Fair) but with Pound's efforts eventually a deal was worked out where, in addition to the $150, Eliot would be awarded the Dial magazine's second annual prize for outstanding service to letters. The prize carried an award of $2,000 (£450).^[14]

In New York in the late summer (with John Quinn, a lawyer and literary patron, representing Eliot's interests) Boni and Liveright made an agreement with The Dial where the magazine would be the first to publish the poem in the US by agreeing to purchase 350 copies of the book at discount from Boni and Liveright.^[15] Boni and Liveright would use the publicity of the award of the Dial's prize to Eliot to increase their initial sales.

The poem was first published in the UK, without the author's notes, in the first issue (October 1922) of The Criterion, a literary magazine started and edited by Eliot. The first appearance of the poem in the US was in the November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine (actually published in late October). In December 1922, the poem was published in the US in book form by Boni and Liveright, the first publication to print the notes. In September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by Eliot's friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land in an edition of about 450 copies, the type handset by Virginia Woolf.

The publication history of The Waste Land (as well as other pieces of Eliot's poetry and prose) has been documented by Donald Gallup.^[16]

Eliot, whose 1922 salary at Lloyds Bank was £500 ($2,215)^[17]made approximately $2,800 (£630) with the Dial, Boni and Liveright and Hogarth Press publications.^[18][19]

[edit] The title

Eliot originally considered titling the poem He do the Police in Different Voices^[20]. 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.^[21]

[edit] Structure

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 at Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die." (Petronius cast the question and answer in Greek).

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."^[22] 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.^[23]

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.^[24]

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Sources

Sources from which Eliot quotes or to which he alludes include the works of: Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Gérard de Nerval, Thomas Kyd, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Joseph Conrad, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner, Oliver Goldsmith, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. Eliot also makes extensive use of Scriptural writings including the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the Hindu Brihad-Aranyaka-Upanishad, and the Buddha's Fire Sermon, and of cultural and anthropological studies such as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (particularly its study of the Wasteland motif in Celtic mythology).

[edit] Critical reception

The poem's initial reception was mixed; though many hailed its portrayal of universal despair and ingenious technique, others, such as F. L. Lucas, detested the poem from the first, while Charles Powell commented "so much waste paper".^[25]

Edmund Wilson's influential piece for The New Republic, "The Poetry of Drought," which many critics have noted is unusually generous in arguing that the poem has an effective cohesive structure, emphasizes autobiographical and emotional elements:

Not only is life sterile and futile, but men have tasted its sterility and futility a thousand times before. T. S. Eliot, walking the desert of London, feels profoundly that the desert has always been there. Like Tiresias, he has sat below the wall of Thebes; like Buddha, he has seen the world as an arid conflagration; like the Sibyl, he has known everything and known everything in vain.

Critic Harold Bloom has observed that the forerunners for The Waste Land are Alfred Lord Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama and particularly Walt Whitman's elegy, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. The major images of Eliot's poem are found in Whitman's ode: the lilacs that begin Eliot's poem, the "unreal city," the duplication of the self, the "dear brother," the "murmur of maternal lamentation," the image of faces peering at us, and the hermit thrush's song.

[edit] Allusions in "The Burial of the Dead"

"The Burial of the Dead" serves as the title of Eliot's first section and is an allusion to The Book of Common Prayer, the prayer book of the Anglican Church.

The second section of "The Burial of the Dead" shifts from the voice of the powerless Marie and becomes the voice of the narrator. The first twelve lines of this section include three Old Testament allusions, and the narrator finds himself in a summer drought that has transformed the land into a desert. He is referred to as the "Son of man" which is a title used of Ezekiel, who was called upon by God to warn Israel to repent of their idolatry. God finally tells Ezekiel that Israel will not change; therefore, their altars will be desolate, images broken, and their cities will lay in waste. Also, in the book of Ecclesiastes, God warns the Jewish people that they should remember the days of their youth, for in their old age "fears shall be in the way" and "then shall the dust return to the earth as it was" (Authorized King James Version, Ezekiel 6:4, Ecclesiastes 12:5-7). Gish analyzes these allusions by writing, "Dead land, broken images, fear and dust, all take on the significance of human failure" (50). After such a depressing sequence of events, the narrator is offered shelter under a mysterious "red rock" which is an allusion to Isaiah's reference to the coming Messiah who will be "as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land" (Authorized King James Version, Isaiah 32:2).

The crowd marches in the "Unreal city" under the fog of a winter's dawn. There are so many people that the narrator exclaims, "I had not thought death had undone so many" (63). This verse is a direct allusion to Dante's Inferno and the people that he witnessed in the vestibule of Hell. Dante writes, "An interminable train of souls pressed on, so many that I wondered how death could have undone so many" (3.55-57). Dante, describing one in the crowd whom he recognizes, writes, "I saw the shade of the one who must have been the coward who made the great refusal" (3.59-60). The "great refusal" that Dante refers to is the lack of choosing either good or evil. They have died without ever living; furthermore, they may not enter either Hell or Heaven since they made no choice in life to be virtuous or to sin.

[edit] References in popular culture

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• William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley uses Eliot's lines on Madam Sosostris as an epigraph
• In the promotional advertisement in DC and Vertigo comics for the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, the character Morpheus is featured with the quote "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
• Martin Rowson has produced a graphic novel adaptation, also entitled The Waste Land, which is a parody of Eliot's poetry and Raymond Chandler-style detective fiction.
• Genesis's track "The Cinema Show" on their album Selling England by the Pound takes its plot, diction and several direct references from the poem.
• P. J. Proby has recorded a spoken word version for Savoy Records.
• Graham Nelson's work of interactive fiction Curses contains a section in which the narrator reads the poem and is transported into the Unreal City.
• Stephen King was inspired by The Waste Land, and quotes several lines from it, in his Dark Tower series. One volume is entitled The Waste Lands.
• In The Simpsons episode "Little Girl in the Big Ten," a poetry club employee sound-checks a stage microphone with the line "Test... test... Roses are red... April is the cruellest month... CRUELLEST MONTH..." before handing the mic off for the introduction of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.
• Two novels by Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward, take their titles from from a couplet in "Death by Water":

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

• The movie Children of Men shares the poem's closing line, "Shantih Shantih Shantih" as well as many common images and themes.
• Actress Fiona Shaw performed The Waste Land as a one-person show at the Liberty Theatre in New York to great acclaim.^[26]
• Tim Powers based his book Last Call largely on The Waste Land's archetypes, and used references and quotes from the book in the text.
• William S. Burroughs quotes lines from the poem in several of his books, particularly the line: "Hurry up please, it's time."
• Evelyn Waugh drew on the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." for the title of his critique of 1930's London society A Handful of Dust. Waugh also pays tribute to the poem in Brideshead Revisited in which Anthony Blanche perches himself on a balcony at Christ Church, Oxford whilst reading "passages from The Waste Land through a megaphone to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river." He reads from Part III, "The Fire Sermon": "'I, Tiresias have foresuffered all,'" he sobbed to them from the Ventian arches -

Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead....

• Robert R. McCammon used a portion of the poem in his novel, Swan Song.
• H. P. Lovecraft wrote a lengthy parody entitled "Waste Paper: a poem of profound insignificance."^[27]
• The band King Crimson uses an audio sample of The Waste Land filtered through a Warr guitar in the first third of their improvisation "The Deception of the Thrush."
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events Book the Eleventh, The Grim Grotto, the poem is used to decode a telegraph message.
• The band Frankie Goes To Hollywood's second album Liverpool contains the song "Warriors of the Wasteland."
• The band Ted Leo and the Pharmacists use the line "Oed und leer das meer" from "The Burial of the Dead" in the song "Biomusicology," a track on their album The Tyranny of Distance.
• The band Darkest Hour use a recitation of the poem in the instrumental The Light At The Edge Of The World on their 2007 album Deliver Us.
• The song "Playboy" by the band Hot Chip begins with the lines "April, the cruelest month."
• Patti Smith wrote a poem, "Death by Water," published in her 1972 book, Seventh Heaven.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Primary sources

• Eliot, T. S. (1963). Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. ISBN 0151189781. 
• The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound by T. S. Eliot, annotated and edited by Valerie Eliot. (Faber and Faber, 1971) ISBN 0-571-09635-2 (Paberback ISBN 0-571-11503-9)

[edit] Secondary sources

• Ackroyd, Peter (1984). T. S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0241113490. 
• Aldington, Richard (1941). Life for Life's Sake. The Viking Press. 
• Bedient, Calvin (1986). He Do the Police in Different Voices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226041417. 
• Bloom, Harold (2003). Genius: a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0446691291. 
• Brooker, Jewel; Joseph Bentley (1990). Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 0870238035. 
• Drew, Elizabeth (1949). T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
• Gish, Nancy (1988). The Waste Land: A Student's Companion to the Poem. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0805780238. 
• Miller, James (1977). T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0271012374. 
• Moody, A. David (1994). The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521421276. 
• North, Michael (ed.) (2000). The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions). W. W. Norton. ISBN 0393974995. 
• Reeves, Gareth (1994). T. S. Eliot's the Waste Land. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 0745007384. 
• Southam, B.C. (1996). A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. ISBN 0156002612. 

[edit] External links

[edit] The poem

• The Waste Land, available at Project Gutenberg.
• Read the complete annotated poem on Bartleby.com

[edit] Annotated versions

• Exploring "The Waste Land"
• A hypertext version of The Waste Land with sources

[edit] Recordings

• Audio of T. S. Eliot reading the poem
• Free audiobook from LibriVox

[edit] Satires

• Satire, The Waste Land by Orson Welles by Christopher T. George