I first read “The Waste Land” when I was 18. It was one of the first poems I tackled on my own outside of a school assignment, and the reason was twofold: Joseph Campbell had mentioned the poem in The Power of Myth (which I read with great excitement also when I was 18) and Stephen King named it as one source of inspiration behind his Dark Tower books – the third book (read when I was 16) was even called The Waste Lands – and I was a huge fan of those first three books. (Still am, and that will have to be its own blog post sometime…) There are today a handful of poems and poets I enjoy (probably some blog posts to-come about those as well), but “The Waste Land” is still the one I return to a re-read the most.
The Poem’s Context
Eliot was born an American, but lived most of his life in England. He left Harvard to study at the University of Marburg, but then left Germany when the Great War broke out in 1914. He relocated to London… and eventually gained British citizenship and joined the Church of England.
Eliot made ends meat through a dull, soulless bank job he hated. From “Prufrok,” through “The Waste Land” and on to “The Hollow Men,” the common theme running through Eliot is a failure to live, a failure to follow your bliss, and thus become a man like Prufrok: uptight, board, unhappy, closed-off, emasculated, indecisive, paralyzed, and impotent in the sense that nothing new or creative comes out of him (and also he can’t get it up). A stuffed shirt. A hollow man.
Meanwhile, WWI marked the end of the world. Seriously. The collapse of one universe and the beginning of another. The end of the 19th century Victorian/Edwardian world and the birth of the Modern. After the War, there’s a lot of nostalgia for the past in Eliot: nostalgia for European empires and colonialism (Eliot wrote, “I am for all Empires.”), and nostalgia for Christianity before the “Death of God” (which Nietzsche announced in 1883, but said he’d come too soon…).
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
London was at war with Ireland, and Ireland was winning her independence. Athens was losing to Turkey. In Jerusalem, violence and riots marked the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Alexandria was dealing with race riots and the British administration (losing its grip) imposed martial law. The specter of Communism was everywhere after the Russian Revolution. And Eliot’s friend John Maynard Keynes had warned everyone that the “Carthaginian Peace” of Versailles (referenced twice in Eliot’s poem) had made a second world war inevitable. “Europe is tired,” wrote Herman Hesse (in an essay Eliot knew well), “Europe wants to be recreated, reborn.”
Falling towers… Unreal cities…
The dead wasteland… Rebirth…
Ezra Pound said that Ulysses marked “the end of the Christian era and the beginning of another.” Eliot was influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses which was being serialized in literary magazines a chapter at a time as he was cooking-up “The Waste Land.” The post-war 1920s was also the apex of Modernism. Part of that was the new idea that art should confront the ugly as well as the classically beautiful. Artists now sought out archetypal forms beneath beauty and ugliness – and boredom. Interpreting the modern world using mythic archetypes was the main game for Picasso and Joyce.
Meanwhile, T.S. and Vivian Eliot’s marriage was not a happy one. There was never much love between them. Both were nervous, anxious people: T.S. having a breakdown and Vivian eventually spiraling into madness. Eliot wrote that the most terrible thing was “to be alone with another person” – a scene that will play-out in A Game of Chess and The Fire Sermon. Add to this stress, Vivian had an affair (with philosopher Bertrand Russel, no less) and contemplated suicide (Eliot later confessed that he longed for her to die), and also Eliot’s father died.
The poem’s choppy, collage-like structure (which I'll get to below) originally came out of Eliot’s illness – much the way Nietzsche’s migraines and stomach ailments led to his aphoristic style. Eliot, described as “anxious, morbid and grumpy,” wrote much of the poem while recuperating at a small sanitarium in Switzerland. He was often just too weak and brain-fevered to write very coherently for long stretches. The genius of “The Waste Land” is that he was able to transmogrify his private issues (severe anxiety, a loveless marriage, a soul-crushing job, possible sexual repression, an emerging Christian faith) into symbols of the age in which he lived: the interwar Lost Generation. And, as I’ve mentioned before, very often my own favorite art is that which is, just like this, able to join-up the personal with the political, the micro with the macro, biography and history. That is often when I think art is at its best.
Where Eliot is not at his best is that, despite his artsy Modernism, Eliot was conservative, antisemitic and a misogynist. The middle part of The Fire Sermon is a bit of a reactionary criticism of degeneracy (homosexuality, casual sex, and gender fluidity) that hasn’t aged well. Meanwhile, Eliot himself exchanged some rather homoerotic letters with Ezra Pound, who was an outright fascist collaborator (imprisoned after WWII and spared by Presidential pardon). Fortunately, neither Eliot’s antisemitism and misogyny nor Pound’s grotesque fascism found their way into “The Waste Land.” Only that mid-part of The Fire Sermon, which is about “bad desires,” shows Eliot’s reactionary tendencies.
Speaking of Ezra Pound, he edited the poem and helped condense Eliot’s long, very messy draft by half, and gave it its proper structure. So we actually have Pound to thank, almost as much as Eliot, for “The Waste Land.”
A “Polyphonic” Poem
It’s 1922 and we’re no longer in a pasture looking at sheep; we’re walking in a modern city overhearing snatches of music and conversations. Big city experience is cut up into strips and shreds – we’re quickly distracted, things are always coming at us. The result is a chop-n-paste collage-effect.
Eliot decided to write a poem in many competing and overlapping voices. He called this “polyphony.” He wanted to express a variety of thoughts and feelings using a variety of voices – all mashed into the same poem, like jumbled conversations in a crowded London street or pub.
Pound used the phrase “dramatic presentations,” and thinking of the poem that way will be very helpful for you. Much of the verses are bits of dialogue or monologue, snatches of overheard conversations. And it thus breaks up into 15 or so little vignettes like mini-scenes in a play… or a film. Two new artforms of the day were movies (Chaplin’s The Kid came out as Eliot was writing the poem, and the whole world was blown-away by Chaplin’s brilliance) and collage. The chop-up, cut-n-paste collage technique was pioneered by Picasso and Braque in Paris (where Pound and Joyce were living and Eliot frequently visited), and anticipated the collage-like, remix style of Eliot’s poem.
“Historical Sense”
Eliot was also influenced by Pound’s “Cantos,” in which Pound explored the idea of tracking historical resonances across time. It was a similar idea that Alan Moore would later develop brilliantly in Voice of the Fire: recurring motifs echoing forward and backwards across history, reflecting and “commenting upon” one-another. This was similar to the lines along which Picasso and Joyce were also running: slamming-together mythic images from the deep past (or foreign cultures) with the modern world.
Eliot was strongly impacted by a mystical experience he had while on holiday with Pound in the South of France. They visited one of the newly discovered Paleolithic painted caves and then a semi-ruined Gothic cathedral later that day… and the connection was formed in Eliot’s mind between the cave temple and the cathedral, 15,000 years across time. (Joseph Campbell later brilliantly illuminated these connections in his books and lectures.) In the Paleolithic caves and the French Gothic cathedrals, Eliot gained the strong sense that all the arts (and religion) are connected across all of time. At the same time, this experience also sparked Eliot’s interest in religion (especially martyrs and sacrifices) that would show-up in the “Waste Land” and eventually lead to him joining the Church of England.
In writing, Eliot began to explore what he called “the historical sense” of the Modern poet. Poets must be in communication with the past – and, crucially, Eliot saw it as a two-way communication. Poets of the present could alter the literature of the past. Each canonical work is altered ever so slightly by the arrival of a new, powerful work. Eliot wrote, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone… Contemporary art is interactive with the art of the past.”
In just 434 lines Eliot makes over 60 allusions to over 40 other writers: some Eastern, some Western; some ancient, some modern… It’s the fragments of a once shared, unifying culture – a Correct Picture of the World – that is now shattered, exploded. “A heap of broken images.” Like others of the “Lost Generation,” Eliot is trying to find (or construct) some new meaning in a world that seems doomed to nihilism and chaos.
The title, and much of the symbolism, came from Jessie Westen’s still-fantastic book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance (1920). In the Grail myth, the health and fertility of the land is linked to the health of the wounded king: the Fisher King, who was castrated in battle. The idea of a sick, dying land, in desperate need of rebirth, is the essence of Europe after the Great War. Eliot was also inspired by seeing Stravinsky’s landmark Modernist ballet The Rite of Spring, with its wild fusion of ancient/Pagan fertility rituals and Picasso-inspired Modern art.
Eliot also manages to pull in popular Jazz ragtime music, the “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag” – the rhythm of which, today, is probably associated by most of us with Michigan J. Frog, the Looney Tunes frog who only performs ragtime for his put-upon owner.
He draws upon Buddhism. Eliot said the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (in which The Buddha explained that desire is the root of all suffering) was equal to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. And he ends the poem by quoting from the Hindu Upanishads.
Thus, Eliot includes a lot but weaves together three main strands:
Pagan fertility myths (drawn from From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough)
The Resurrection of Christ (as retcon foretold by Ezekiel)
The Buddhist and Hindu notions of Nirvana and spiritual escape from suffering
These three threads dazzlingly come together at the end to offer a way forward and out of the Waste Land…
My Roadmap to The Waste Land
If you want, you can find annotated editions and line-by-line breakdowns of the poem. I’m obviously not doing that here. Rather, in case I’ve wet your whistle enough to want to read/hear it, I’m just going to give you a general map of the terrain so you won’t be totally lost your first time through.
You can read the full text here:
https://wasteland.windingway.org/
However, I strongly recommend listening to the reading by the great Alec Guinness, which you can find on YouTube here:
Poetry is meant to be heard aloud, and this is a pretty good reading by old Obi-Wan. If you get lost, don’t worry; just back-up a minute or two and reorient yourself – and remember, you’re supposed to feel lost…
1. The Burial of the Dead
Describes the spring thaw (Europe after the Great War)
Austrian Countess Marie Larisch remembers her childhood with her second-cousin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (obviously before the War that his assassination caused)
A scene derived from Ezekiel 37, in which the desert prophet has his pivotal “Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones”
A few lines from Wagner’s opera Tristan & Iseult
A conversation between a romantic girl and her hollowed-out lover (a traumatized, returning soldier)
Madame Sosostris, the Tarot card reader (“Fear death by water”) – one of the most famous scenes in the poem
Description of the “Unreal City,” where Stetson runs into a War-buddy… and Eliot reminds us of the millions of decomposing bodies left behind during the war, fertilizing the soil of Europe.
2. A Game of Chess
A wealthy lady (inspired by Vivian Eliot) having a nervous breakdown in an opulent room over a game of chess with her taciturn, distant husband (T.S. Eliot) who is suffering PTSD from the War (Eliot wasn’t in the war but had a nervous breakdown anyway)
A lower class girl (the Eliot’s maid) in a Tavern gossiping about her friends Lil & Albert (who’s returning from the War) while the barkeep tries to usher them out. Lil is 31, she’s already had 5 kids, and her body’s messed-up because she took some janky 1920s abortion pills, but Albert keeps pushing sex on her. (The wasteland causes sexual dysfunction and damages women’s reproductive capabilities.)
3. The Fire Sermon
The sad Fisher King (the ghost of Franz Ferdinand whose fatal wounding created the Waste Land) fishing in the Thames (or Lac Leman in the Alps), plagued by visions of grotesque scenes from the trenches. The river nymphs (symbols of natural fertility) have departed. He overhears snatches of old songs without context or meaning.
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, attempts a gay pick-up
Tiresias, the Greek prophet, watches two dull people, the typist and the real estate clerk, have boring, mid-day sex she doesn’t want or enjoy
A lament from the Thames Maidens, the departed nymphs, for their lost river
A woman gives us a candid, detached view of her sexual history
The Buddha chants: “Burning, burning, burning” away desire (here, specifically lust) as the only way out of this suffering
4. Death by Water
A brief riff on Ariel's dirge from The Tempest: “Full fathom five thy father lies.” (In order to heal their wounded king and summon rain, some Pagan tribes would make sacrifices involving ritual drownings. Here, Phlebas' death summons the Thunder…)
5. What the Thunder Said
We cross the desert wasteland, accompanied by a mysterious figure inspired by the story of Christ's resurrection in Luke 24:13-35
We reach the dreadful Chapel Perilous from the Grail Quest and see nightmare visions of bats with babies’ faces, upside down towers in the air, crumbling cities, and more trench rats gnawing bones
A Hindu yogi (also the Fisher King) on the banks of the Ganges (also the Thames) hears three Sanskrit words in the Thunder: Datta (charity), Dayadhvam (compassion), Damyata (control – here referring to surrendering control to God). At last, the rain comes.
The Christian Fisher King on the River Thames, the “arid plain” behind him, overhearing a polyphony of voices around him, experiences Shantih (a mystical peace that “surpasses understanding”)
In a collapsing, dying world – falling empires, dying religions, stupid wars, dull people, bad sex, fascism and Stalinism on the way – the wounded Fisher King finds “peace in ruin, peace in horror, peace in madness” (Matthew Hollis). Prefiguring Joseph Campbell’s comparative method, Eliot here proposes combing through the world’s religions for healing methods that, when combined and updated, might provide spiritual relief. Not a bad plan! And now that the 2020s are repeating the 1920s all over again, the poem feels more alive, powerful, and relevant than it has for the last 90 years.
Datta Dayadhvam Damyata
Shantih Shantih Shantih