Fifth Response (Post-Madness Recovery)

Upon its publication in 1922, The Waste Land has produced an understandably varied range of reactions, most of these ranging from extreme praise, extreme hatred, and to some of just confused positivity, only giving the intimidating poem merits to disparage their own integrity. For the two articles that I examined for this entry, I chose very opposing reviews of The Waste Land, the first being an article assigned to the class to read, "How To Read the Waste Land So It Alters Your Soul" by Mary Carr (you can see which way that leans), and the other being a particularly scathing review by a Mr. John Crowe Ransom, "Waste Lands". Both provide valuable insights into Eliot's poem, but I will state that "How To Read" is much more progressive than "Waste Lands", or at least in my mind. Ransom's anger is, in my eyes, warranted, but still a common reaction to the reader who reads it for the first time and cannot understand it. My bias, in this sense, will lean with Carr's essay, but this is not a problem seeing that the assignment is a comparison of the essays. In a sense, I suppose that I have already started...


"Waste Lands" vs. "How To Read the Waste Land So It Alters Your Soul"


Directly after the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, a fleet of reviews on the poem were published, many of them critical of the author, T.S. Eliot. Such was the case with "Waste Lands." Published in The New York Evening Post Literary Review in July of 1923, this particular article is representative of the negative views surrounding Eliot's book. Ransom's first criticism of the book is its particular form, which is undisputed with any scholar:

...Mr. Eliot's performance is the apotheosis (or "epitome" for those, like me, who believe that "apotheosis" was left behind in the 19th century) of modernity, and seeems to bring to a head all the specifically modern errors, and to cry for critic's ink of a volume quite disproportionate to its merits as a poem.

It is no secret to the reader that Eliot was arguably the father of modernist poetry, and while we commend him for such creativity, critics of the era were less than amused with all of the irregularities in the modern poetry form, most of which were defined in The Waste Land. Ransom had a particular problem with the "extreme disconnection", claiming that beginnings and ends of sections are almost impossible to discern and gives off the impression of perhaps fifty or more parts. He also argues that breaking down the poem into smaller parts and dissecting those as opposed to writing for the meaning of the whole disrupts the flow and puts values on the individual pieces. Finding meaning in the individual sections, as he explains, takes away from what the poem itself is trying to convey. Much of this article is spent trying to make sense of the discontinuities in ideas and structure.
The second section of Ransom's argument pertains to another modernistic tool: "Borrowing" (as I shall say) from past works. Two small points are trying to be made in this:
1) That the context of the section of his poem where he inserts the borrowed lines matches with the actual meaning of those lines, and
2) That, in trying to fabricate a new form, he is only naively borrowing from ideaologies long past.
His summation is an accurate representation of the overall review:

'The Waste Land' is one of the most insubordinate pomes in the language, and perhaps it is the most unequal. ...The genius of our language is notoriously given to feats of hospitality: but it seems to me it will be hard pressed to find accommodations at the same time for two such incompatibles as Mr. Wordsworth and the present Mr. Eliot; and any realist must admit that what happens to be the prior tenure of the mansion in this case is likely to be stubbornly defended.

Mary Carr's article, however, is extremely praising and optimistic. With everything that our cynic, Mr. Ransom, implies, she refutes, though not directly. Every sentence, every word, every reference, in Carr's eye, is placed there perfectly, an undisputable brush or stroke from a proclaimed genius. She feels that modern society does not embrace the poem as much as they should and argues this in the first part of her essay. She also explains the bitter irony of explaining to a student whose paper she is editing that non-linear jumps are hazy and disruptive, despite the fact that her own hero employs them in her favorite work. Still, with Eliot, his supposed discontinuities are results of his insertions of classic literature, a homage to the foundations of his own knowledge and a treat to his readers. Carr goes on to discuss other parts of Eliot's work, such as his footnotes, and sifts through them in a very smooth meander as she presents this stream of thought that opposes that of Ransom's

Some middle ground is to be found, mind you. Both Carr and Ransom acknowledge that Eliot is undisputedly an academic. His allusions are powerful, his poetry masterful, and although Carr does not directly admit, The Waste Land is a very well-written poem.