39 pages • 1 hour read
The Waste Land
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"Antwerp" by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
One of the most influential but little-known expressions of modernist poetry, this ambitious pacifist work—centered on the heroic resistance of the Belgians to the brutal invasion by Germany in 1914—argued the harrowing emotional and psychological impact of war. The poem reinvented inherited poetic forms using fragmented lines, enjambment, and subtle sight rhymes. Eliot often cited the poem as the only war poem he admired.
Cantos by Ezra Pound (1926)
Given Pound’s enormous influence on shaping Eliot’s work (overseeing the editing of more than half of Eliot’s original draft) this book-length sequence of 116 Pound poems—unfinished at the time of its publication—helps understand Eliot’s own intricate experiments with line breaks and with the aural impact of poetry. The themes reflect Eliot’s sense of a civilization lost to its own history and adrift within a spiritual malaise, save that Pound was more interested in the economics of the decline of Western civilization.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot (1915)
In this, Eliot’s first published poem, the character of Prufrock—a hypersensitive, over-educated wanna-be poetaster—takes a stroll to an evening tea in London. He wants to engage a woman in conversation but dreads the approaching showdown. He does not see his own insignificance: how he is all but lost to a world that ignores him. The disastrous evening leaves him pondering the slow-motion waste of his life. The character of Prufrock anticipates many of the spiritually dead characters who come and go in The Waste Land.
Further Literary Resources
The Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land edited by Michael North (2000)
This all-in-one casebook provides the full text of the poem along with Eliot’s massive appendix of explanatory footnotes, in addition to further notes explaining Eliot’s annotations. Further, the volume provides a compendium of secondary critical material including initial reviews by establishment critics uncertain what Eliot was doing, and more sensitive responses by other modernists, including Virginia Woolf and Pound. The text includes as well as the most valuable contemporary exegesis into the poem’s content.
The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire by Nancy K. Gish (1988)
This book-length reading of the poem, written in an accessible and reader-friendly style, is still considered among the most thorough and rewarding analyses of Eliot’s masterpiece. Gish uses “the patterns of yearning” as a strategy for organizing her reading. She explores how Eliot’s personal life (in shambles at the time he wrote the poem) and his perceptions of Western civilization after the trauma of The Great War created the revolutionary voice of the poem. Gish provides a careful chapter-by-chapter reading of the poem’s characters and how each is an avatar of Eliot and each struggles with the yearning for love and the surrender to loss.
"The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’s Collaboration on Hysteria" by Wayne Koestenbam (1988)
Still regarded as the definitive exploration of the dynamic between Eliot and his mentor/friend Pound, this award-winning article stakes out the challenges Pound put to Eliot to create order from fragmentation. The article investigates how Pound walked an emotionally distraught Eliot through more than 14 months of revision. Eliot excised distracting narrative lines, removed the scaffolding that identified a controlling narrator, introduced bolder rhythmic variety using music, and more subtly worked his intricate system of copious allusions into the poem to allow the poem to suggest rather than inform and to indirectly hint at its anger through characters never entirely defined. Pound, in the end, was responsible for editing more than half of Eliot’s original manuscript.
Listen to the Poem
Despite its prohibitive length and tricky sonic effects, The Waste Land has been recorded more than 40 times—most notably by Oscar-winning British actor Jeremy Irons and another by Eliot himself (although his distinctly twangy Midwestern nasally inflection is distracting to some listeners). The gold-standard recording of the poem is this 1968 one, available on YouTube by British Oscar-winner Sir Alec Guinness for BBC radio. Guinness’s slow and cadenced delivery expertly works with Eliot’s shifting voices, including working with spot-on character accents. In addition, Guinness handles the intricate demand of the off-beat in the blank verse and Eliot’s subtle rhymes all in the rich, sonorous voice of Obi-Wan Kinobe.
The YouTube recording, however, provides as visual commentary to the recitation not images that match Eliot’s poem but rather, curiously, studio head shots of Guinness himself. Other than that jarring juxtaposition, this is a gorgeous reading of the poem.
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By T. S. Eliot
