Never tire of reading The Wasteland. So many two star ratings and reviews. I find that abit odd. ( )

So embarrassed to be giving TS Eliot 3 stars, but now that I've read it, I probably won't do a re-read. I liked Prufrock more than The Wasteland. I could spend days reading the commentaries and then the literary allusions from the poems. I felt Prufrock was delightful and read it several times. I felt I read The Wasteland multiple times (with commentary) because it was imperative to a decent poetic education. It seemed like a lot of World War I angst and soldiers returning with PTSD - a sad poem, really. I read this small book which I've owned for years because my sister decided to read his poems so we might have a discussion about it. ( )

After reading Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, the title of which is derived from T.S. Eliot's modernist poem, The Waste Land, I was compelled to read the poem and to learn more about Eliot. Up until today, my knowledge of Eliot was limited to what I had gleaned from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

I have read all around Eliot, including Djuna Barnes (whom Eliot admired)1, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Andersen, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf. But I have shied away from poetry until only recently.

After reading the poem, I listened to the BBC's In Our Time podcast episode, "The Waste Land and Modernity". There was much interesting discussion about the original book version of Eliot's poem. Apparently, the poem itself was too short to be a book and the publisher asked Eliot to pad it out.

Eliot added a bunch of notes to the poem, many of which turned out to be superfluous. The poem had also been cut down considerably by Ezra Pound, which took away the various signals of the several stories that emerge in the poem.

I listened to a reading of the poem on YouTube, partly read by Eliot. In the In Our Time discussion, they mentioned that the poem was published at the same time BBC Radio began, so in many ways the poem lends itself to a radio reading. It is interesting how listening to the poem being read makes the different voices more obvious, whereas this is somewhat obscured in a first reading (to oneself).

In sum, an issue that constantly strikes me is that the more I read, the less I know. And in many ways, based on my reading around The Waste Land, and from the discussions on the In Our Time podcast, Eliot meant to show how we don't or can't know everything; indeed, we may not need to know everything.

Even the different interpretations by American versus English critics revealed different interpretations of common English sayings highlighted in the poem. And of course, there are many references to the classics and so on which I hope to discover by obtaining a copy of the original (pre-Pound) version of the poem, and also the published version with the superfluous notes added by Eliot.

The poem apparently took Eliot one year to write, and he was quite upset by the paltry sum first offered to him for its publication. Yet it is now regarded as the most influential poems of the twentieth century.

Like all great works, the poem deserves several readings. But if you want to really hear the different voices, the recital of the poem will bring this to the fore. ( )

(Original review, 1981-05-10)

It seems to me that the author of 'Prufrock' and that of the Wasteland are so different as to be un-recognisable. A look at the Wasteland reveals a lot of, to me, gratuitous classical referencing for which we might like to blame Pound and while I value its novelty (whereas Prufrock reads like Kublai Khan) the Wasteland reads like deliberate pastiche.

Eliot learned the need to inject stock ingredients into a poem if it is to fly with editors, perhaps explaining why Prufrock languished for so long. Don't tell me Hughes and Heaney weren't aware of a certain formulaic approach to poetry. I'm not saying it is a liability or necessarily a bad thing but I am saying that what is considered 'good' has more to do with vogue than what Eliot referred to as 'the really new'. Again, Auden's earliest published poetry fell into the trap of not pandering to 'the right style', so much so that the work is still un-excavated (properly) with a few notable exceptions. His more public style of the middle and late periods got their promised reward but it speaks to the public and not to his fellow poets as the early work did. At the height of Auden's fame, fewer than a thousand ciopies of his work were sold).

I recall reading how Joyce, upon first meeting Yeats (at a train station), wondered whether Yeats wasn't too old to understand what he (Joyce) was about. Eliot's first wife and Molly were peas in a pod it sounds to me, antidotes to the ossified world of Cultoor they had to cope with.

Eliot's time at Lloyd's, working by day as a Magritteish clerk while struggling with his real self is a far more attractive (and less educated) persona than the donnish Faber editor. Respectability doesn't seem to have done Eliot, his poetry at least, much good but of course it's all a matter of taste and perspective. Millions love their Eliot the way he be served up to them.

Rilke wins for me against the earlier Eliot, 'Duino Elegies' being far more sensitive, far less showy and show-offy (far less cringely 'erudite'), every bit as precise in its detailed anatomy of the new age then dawning and at least as startlingly wonderful in its imagery. There is, also, no vaudeville (he do the police in different voices but none of it terribly well) and it didn't need that madman Pound to strip it into shape. ( )

He was not a nice man, but his poetry is unmatched. So rhythmic, visceral, rolls in the mouth, incantatory. His words are pictures, unforgettable. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber can't touch him.