The Waste Land and Other Poems

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.

(from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ page 9)

 

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance—

(from ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ page 17)

 

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.

(from ‘Gerontion,’ page 37)

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

 

(from ‘The Waste Land,’ page 65)

 

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses.

 

(from ‘The Waste Land,’ page 78)

 

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

(from ‘The Waste Land,’ page 81 )

Published by Barnes & Noble Books
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Prufrock and Other Observations
was first published in 1917,
Poems 1920
in 1919, and
The Waste Land
in 1922.

 

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright @ 2005 by Randy Malamud.

 

Note on T. S. Eliot, The World of T. S. Eliot and His Poetry, Inspired by T. S. Eliot and
The Waste Land,
and Comments & Questions Copyright @ 2004 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-279-6 ISBN-10: 1-59308-279-7

eISBN : 978-1-411-43348-9

LC Control Number 2004112106

 

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Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America

QM

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Poet, critic, playwright, editor, and Nobel laureate, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, to Henry Ware and Charlotte Stearns Eliot. The family shared a double allegiance to Missouri and New England—Eliot’s grandfather founded the Unitarian Church of St. Louis; his mother’s family were settlers in the first Massachusetts Bay Colony. Young Eliot’s temperament tended toward the reserve of his New England heritage, and summers spent on the Massachusetts coast would later inform his poems.

After early private schooling, Eliot followed his brother to Harvard University, where he joined the Signet literary society and studied a remarkable array of subjects. Deeply influenced by the Symbolist movement, he published his first poems in the Harvard
Advocate.
After receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees, Eliot traveled to Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, and frequented the salons of Europe’s most influential thinkers and artists. He returned for graduate work to Harvard, where he pursued a doctorate in philosophy with such renowned professors as Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, and William James. After three years of intense study, including courses in Hebrew and Sanskrit, Eliot won a fellowship to Marburg, Germany. World War I cut short his time there, and after a brief tenure at Oxford he was taken under the wing of avant-garde literary figure Ezra Pound.

Beginning with the publication of
Prufrock and Other Observations
in 1917, Eliot’s reputation as a major poet grew during the postwar years. But his marriage to the physically and emotionally troubled Vivien Haigh-Wood precipitated a nervous breakdown in 1921. While recuperating in Margate, England, and Lausanne, Switzerland, Eliot composed
The Waste Land
(1922). Ezra Pound was entrusted with editing the unwieldy manuscript, and his decisive, even radical changes did much to hone the work. When it was published by
The Dial
in 1922, the modernist masterpiece changed the way poetry was both read and composed.

Eliot juggled his writing with work at Lloyds Bank and editorial positions at
The Egoist
and
The Criterion,
and later at the publishing house Faber and Faber. In 1927 he became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church. After he separated from Vivien in 1932, he produced a tremendous amount of work: creative writing, literary criticism, and a series of university lectures.

Eliot’s many essays on culture, language, and literature greatly influenced twentieth-century criticism. In ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (1919) he introduced the notion of the ‘objective correlative‘—an objective fact or circumstance that correlates with an inner feeling—as part of his argument for precision of language. In ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ ( 1921 ) he defined ‘dissociation of sensibility’ as a break between feeling and thought that had occurred as English poetry was written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Eliot advocated the reuniting of emotion and intellect in works of literature.

Eliot was also a playwright; among his major dramatic works are
Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party,
and
The Elder Statesman.

Shortly after the publication of his second masterpiece, Four
Quartets
(1943), Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as countless awards and honorary doctorates.
Four Quartets
was the last of Eliot’s major poetry, but he remained occupied with writing for the rest of his life. He published more than 600 works in the course of his career, and worked at Faber and Faber until his death. Personal happiness finally came with his marriage to Valerie Fletcher in 1957. T. S. Eliot died in London in 1965 and was buried in East Coker, with the epitaph, ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning,’ taken from
Four Quartets.