The Waste Land and Other Poems (3 page)

A first-time reader confronted with
The Waste Land
must determine, at the outset, how to read the poem: how to assimilate it and make sense of it. It is, of course, ‘modern,’ so one approaches it with the same understanding of modern aesthetics that one brings to Picasso’s cubism, or Stravinsky’s symphonies, or Diaghilev’s dance. One allows that the apparent chaos of the work, the difficulty, the excess, is in some way mimetic of the dazzling and sometimes incoherent world outside; and also that things will not be presented in a neat, clear narrative structure, because anything too conventional or too easily accessible would be consequently trite—one must work hard to glean important insights from the modern zeitgeist. Modernists believed that the more complex a text is, the more likely it is to do justice to the complexity of the world outside, a world that in the space of one generation is awakening to cinema, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, world war, and so forth.

The poem suggests many schemes or models—probably far too many—that offer aids to comprehension. Some of these come from Eliot’s own critical apparatus: The notes at the end of the poem, for example, promise insights. The endnotes were not included with the first two periodical publications of the poem—in
The Criterion
(London) in October 1922 and in
The Dial
(New York) the next month; they appeared only with the first book edition. Eliot once said that the publishers of this edition ‘wanted a larger volume and the notes were the only available matter,’ and in a 1957 lecture he referred to them as a ‘remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship.’ In fact, the notes vary greatly in relevance and usefulness.

The notes to lines 218 and 412 seem to be tremendously important keys to the poem, in terms of explaining how readers may resolve the confusing medley of perspectives and consciousness (Tiresias is ‘the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest,’ Eliot writes in his note to line 218, and his comment at line 412 gives a brief but incisive explanation of how Bradleyan philosophy—the subject of his dissertation—informs the sensory experience of the poem). The references to various sources show how intertextually Eliot composed, and how he wants us to read; several notes reference other passages in the poem, giving a sense of its internal connections and letting readers know that it is important to make these kind of associations—to remember what has gone on before, and how we might organize and categorize the array of images and themes that the poem presents.

On the other hand, some of the notes seem pointless, such as the one at line 46 that begins ‘I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards ...’; and some are unexpectedly personal: The note to line 68 coyly reads, ‘A phenomenon which I have often noticed’ (providing, at least in a small way, another piece of evidence for reading the poem as an autobiographical account). Certainly the references to Jessie Weston and Sir James Frazer at the top of the endnotes are informative: They have spurred numerous critical commentaries about how the poem may be read as a kind of quest, along the lines of Weston’s study of the Grail legend, or as an anthropological account of independent but congruent myths, as Frazer described in his masterwork
The Golden Bough.

At one point in my career, I actually read the poem while stopping to consult every reference that Eliot cites. I cannot say that this exercise necessarily helped me understand the poem better, but I did spend a great deal of time pursuing an eclectic and useful course of reading as prescribed by Professor Eliot, and perhaps this was precisely the point: to make sure that readers experienced a large dose of other works in the more conventional literary canon, by Ovid and Baudelaire and Goldsmith and Verlaine, to mitigate the experience of reading just
The Waste Land,
just this modernist spasm. I think Eliot intended that people not read the poem in isolation, because it makes sense only to the extent that we appreciate it as being in dialogue with the vast tradition that preceded it. Eliot makes this point in one of his best-known essays, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (see ‘For Further Reading’), where he writes, ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’ And he makes the point that not only does the older work inform the new, but also vice versa: ‘What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.’

When one reads
The Waste Land
through the lens of its myriad literary allusions and echoes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dante appear as the most prominent touchstones; the reader is invited to make connections, and to compare Eliot’s aesthetic to those of his predecessors. The opening lines invoke, obviously, the beginning of the General Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales.
For Chaucer, in his dazzling sociocultural survey, April and its rains were soothing, nurturing, regenerative. The cycles of nature, of seasons, of social ceremonies, were all fecund with the possibility of generating new narratives. Eliot’s ironic reiteration of Chaucer’s April suggests an antithetical, cynical outlook on all the cultural observations that were so profusely interesting to the fourteenth-century poet. If Chaucer’s work stands as an opening bookend to the literary tradition, Eliot seems to be positioning his own contribution to the tradition as the closing bookend, the poem to end all poems. The pilgrims’ fresh, vibrant, profusely detailed personalities that Chaucer paraded in the General Prologue become, in Eliot’s hands, more stinted and interiorized; elusive, troubled, and socially dubious.

Chaucer’s cast of characters was brimming with stories: performances of self-expression, or anagnorisis, or morality, or cultural criticism. If we regard
The Waste Land
as Eliot’s General Prologue, though, it is difficult to imagine what sorts of narratives might ensue from, say, Madame Sosostris or Mr. Eugenides or Mrs. Porter or Marie. For Chaucer, the point of the stories was to pass the time on the long journey to Canterbury: to accompany the spiritual quest and the communal act of devotion it embodied with the more popular, personal, pluralistic strain that the stories would foster. In
The Waste Land,
if it seems that the narratives are pervasively muted (‘I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed’; ‘Why do you never speak’; ‘I made no comment’), perhaps that is meant to suggest that there is no spiritual pilgrimage to be undertaken comparable to Chaucer’s (so there’s no point offering up any stories to pass the time on the journey that there’s no point in taking anyhow), or that if such a quest is conceivable, then the cultural tradition at hand, bankrupt in the wake of early-twentieth-century chaos, has no stories to accompany the quest. (Perhaps not in English, but in another tongue? Perhaps that is why there are so many languages in the poem, and why the culminating mantras appear in Sanskrit rather than in any European tongue.) The cruelty of Eliot’s April, as contrasted with the sweetness of Chaucer’s, reflects the modernist angst at coming around once again to a season that has traditionally been associated with rebirth and resurrection, but finding the task at present horribly unpromising.

Shakespeare and Dante are also frequently evoked in the poem. Eliot wrote numerous critical essays about both of them, explaining his preference for the clear, devout certainty of Dante’s voice over what he saw as Shakespeare’s muddled, polymorphous aesthetic. Eliot believed a great poet is an amanuensis of his times, and Dante was fortunate to have lived in an era that Eliot found ideologically and intellectually more coherent than the Elizabethan age. (As for what he thought about his own time: The nervous, schizophrenic entropy of
The Waste Land
demonstrates how disappointed he was with the cultural incoherence of his contemporary society. A culture gets what it deserves.)

In his 1929 essay
Dante,
Eliot wrote, ‘Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.’ And thus, Eliot concludes, ‘Shakespeare gives the greatest
width
of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth.’

Within the schema of
The Waste Land,
this suggests that Dante is the more valuable guide. The
width
of human passion in the poem seems ultimately unsatisfying and ineffective: Of the numerous potential passionate engagements—ranging from Marie and the arch-duke in part I to ‘you and I together’ walking in part V—few last more than a half-dozen lines. The accumulation of these scenes fails to advance communality or commonweal, suggesting the insubstantiality of a Shakespearean ‘width of passion.’ The poem’s more effective movement, instead, describes a journey from the depths of human passion—wintry hibernation, barren and mechanical lust—to the altitude of the clouds over Himavant, where the voice of the thunder broaches guidance and peace.

The Dante-Shakespeare binary is closely associated with an important thematic opposition in the poem, fire versus water. Passages with Dantean resonances invoke the intensities of the fiery torment of
Inferno,
while the Shakespearean allusions tend to recall water. It might seem that the Shakespearean water would be a desirable antidote to the dryness of the waste land, but in fact such water always proves delusory in its potentially nurturing effect. At the beginning of part II, for example, Eliot invokes Cleopatra’s image as the magnificent, seductive queen is seen floating down the Nile—the barge in her queenly procession ‘burnt on the water’ as Shakespeare put it, provocatively uniting fire and water; but Eliot undercuts this imagery as his modern Cleopatra merely ‘glowed on the marble.’ Eliot rejects the possibility that fire and water can be so easily reconciled, and he realizes that Cleopatra’s ultimate failure was her misperception of the reality of water. Her poor leadership is reflected in Antony’s ill-fated decision (compounded by her whimsical and arbitrary nautical strategy) to wage war on the water rather than on land. Shakespeare’s water here represents irresponsible weakness.

Other Shakespearean resonances in the poem similarly evoke Shakespearean mistakes associated with water: At the end of part II, Eliot alludes to Ophelia’s suicide and her fallacious belief that the water in which she drowned herself might bring her some respite. And in part III, allusions to
The Tempest
evoke Ferdinand’s entranced delusions about the force of the water and what has really happened to the rulers of Naples and Milan in their sea journey. Water is obviously a necessary element in
The Waste Land,
fundamentally important if one is to traverse and survive a dry, barren landscape, but Shakespeare’s water turns out to be a mirage: too aesthetically attenuated, too unusable by the characters dazzled by Shakespearean elegance, which derails the audience’s attention to the real stakes of the struggles.

 

In 1971, Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, published a critical and facsimile edition presenting the drafts of the poem, adding a great deal to our understanding of its genesis and development. We see Pound’s extensive and brilliant editing of a messy, uncertain manuscript, testimony to his crucial role as Eliot’s midwife in the poem’s birth. A dedicatory epigraph thanks Pound as
‘il miglior fabbro’-the
better craftsman—and this crafting elucidates how a murky, sometimes rambling set of observations (in the mode of Eliot’s first poetry collection) and dense, surreal conundrums (in the mode of his second) became the clear, keen, vatic poesis of his masterpiece.

Pound added only two words to the poem: ‘demobbed’ (short for ‘demobilized‘—sent home from the war) and ‘demotic’ (‘common, popular, vulgar’): Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, unshaven, ‘Asked me in demotic French’ to a possibly sordid luncheon and then a weekend at the Metropole. Mainly Pound challenged and bolstered Eliot’s voice; he queried and cut. He edited the poem as if he were editing a film (cognizant that, in the 1920s, film was emerging as a bold and powerful new medium that was perhaps uniquely qualified to capture the modern temperament) : relegating large, ineffective passages to the cutting-room floor; heightening a sense of sensory immediacy and direct visual intensity; linking and juxtaposing scenes with quick, startling cuts. He identified passages he found especially effective, such as the second verse paragraph of part III, by scrawling ‘echt’ (meaning veritable, real) in the margin, and worked to lift the entire manuscript up to that standard. Pound chided Eliot when he used the word ‘perhaps’: ‘Dam per’apsez,’ he wrote in his idiosyncratic phonetic diction. He knew that this poem needed to resonate with clear, crisp certainties, not equivocation. And again, when Eliot wrote what is now line 251 (‘Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass’) in a less definitive mode (‘Across her brain one half-formed thought may pass’) Pound responded, ‘make up yr. mind.’ Pound nurtured the poem’s clear, definitive voice, which he educed from a much more tentative draft—and Eliot’s initial hesitations and uncertainties are completely understandable considering his tenuous mental and emotional condition during the first stage of composition.

Pound had also a strong sense of what the poem’s style and meter should look like: its distinctive, hard, harsh sound and prosody emerged out of an earlier version that was more muddled and varied in style. ‘Too loose,’ he wrote by one passage, and ‘rhyme drags it out to diffuseness’ in another (both of which were cut: Eliot followed Pound’s suggestions faithfully).

A few other interesting cuts and developments in the manuscript include an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness—
the passage that conveys Kurtz’s dying words—that was brilliantly apropos but, as Eliot and Pound presumably realized, too heavy-handed : superfluous. Indeed, we hear ‘The horror! the horror!’ in
The Waste Land
all the more clearly, and hauntingly, for the effacement of this epigraph. Part IV, ‘Death by Water,’ a tight, condensed, Imagist concentration of Phlebas the Phoenician’s travail in the finished version, was at first a grueling, detailed sea narrative. Reading the manuscript, one appreciates that it was an important developmental effort for Eliot to have sketched out the entire fateful journey, but ultimately the keener effect was achieved when he jettisoned the long buildup and left only the quiet, slightly surreal, yet soothing denouement.