First Post

As a staple of modern poetry, The Waste Land is widely considered “one of the most important poems of the 20th Century”, or at least to Alan Bennett of The Guardian and not the half-dozen poetry majors around campus whose impromptu reviews of the piece were virulent at the mildest. Yes, T.S. Eliot seems to have carved his face into the tablets of Modern Poetry with a poem that evokes only the strongest emotions in readers; a dichotomous split of love and hate that is found all too often in the classics (e.g. Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, “Stairway to Heaven”, etc.). This being said, how can such an important poem be hated by so many? The answer is the individualized reader response, something that I, myself, will examine in my own reading of the book and report back to you in this blog. Together we will show Eliot who is boss; together we will conquer The Waste Land! Haha!

So, do you remember that geek in high school with the bad acne, Haletosis, and horn-rimmed glasses that everybody hated because he could speak Russian fluently and took every opportunity to do it? Well, T.S. Eliot seems to be that kid. Except that instead of Russian it’s Greek, Latin, Italian, and German. And without the bad breath. Some scholars today scorn Eliot’s particular style as elitist and exclusive to the academic world, something that should not have any place in a craft devoted to the common people. This view is validated, and the reader picks up on this before the poem even starts. On the dedication page, an incomprehensible epigram written in Latin and Greek is shown at the top of the page with an Italian phrase posted below the only readable sentence on the page: “For Ezra Pound”. Normal circumstances would require the reader to grab a computer or an Italian to decipher such madness, but since the book has included the translations in the subtext, we are fortunate enough to have access to all of the information we so desperately need without having to lift our grubby little fingers off of the book. Assuming most readers qualify for “normal circumstances”, seeing this early display of linguistics could confuse or even push away readers who do not understand the text, regardless of the good visual property of having two languages printed close to each other. This, at first, threw me off guard, but seeing that these sentences actually had some significance revived my hopes that Eliot was not such an exclusive guy. I will give him the benefit of a doubt for this since Sibyl was an interesting character and since Italian “sounds totally badass” (according to my roommate, Ryan).
Reading the first couple of lines, I have easily picked up on the irony of April being cruel and Winter being warm, something that was quite pleasing after the intellectual shalacking Eliot dished in the dedication. I have also noticed the brevity of these first seven lines and the repetition of verbs in the present participle (“mixing”, “stirring”, “covering”, “feeding”). Particular emphasis is being put on these words to accentuate images of memory and roots, or so we can only infer. In the middle of this, the author actually introduces himself using a first person pronoun, but in the plural sense (“Winter kept us warm...”). Who is “us”? Moving through the next couple of lines about “Starnbergersee” and “Hofgarten”, we then come to a simple line written in German that starts the unquoted dialogue between a presumably Lithuanian woman (who is actually a “true German”). This transition is interesting since it introduces a new character to the text, even if you have to read the paragraph three times to realize that the speaker did not stay at the archduke’s as a child and did not have a cousin that uttered, “Marie, Maire, hold on tight.”


Seeing the length of this, I will stop here and let all of this sink in. The next post will cover the rest of the first section of The Waste Land.