Part Three(ish)

As most of you have guessed by now, this blog has mostly dedicated itself to following my reading of The Waste Land in all of its splendor and glory. This post, however, is different; with this I will be discussing a literary review of the book written by the poet Elinor Wylie, written in 1923 in the New York Evening Post Literary Review (quite a mouth-full, huh?). An analysis of"Mr. Eliot's Slug-Horn", the name of this particular review, is not only a part of the assignment for class, but it is also conducive to the reader's understanding of how the author's feelings correlate with the poem that he writes. Views like this are Biographical-Historical Criticisms, the predominant criticism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and though they is technically obsolete, the Biographical-Historical Criticisms were relevant then and helped reviewers like Wylie understand the difficult poem that we are studying today.


Studying T.S. Eliot, as Elinor Wylie explains in "Mr. Eliot's Slug-Horn", must be done objectively and in a closed manner with no assumptions outside of what the author gives us. Otherwise, examining what Eliot is not will interrupt our vision of what Eliot is. Previous authors have compared his work to the likes of Ezra Pound and Dante, being that his form is modernist, and others claim that he is "no more cryptic than Donne and Yeats", and some state that his work is not as "genius" as James Joyces, but Wylie dismisses all of these as close-minded and unnecessary.
Throwing aside all of the comparisons and arguable fallacies, Wylie examines The Waste Land as an emotional piece, one that, in each word, lies his very soul and being.

The most important conduit of emotion that an author can provide in any text is a channel to his very soul, something that must be offered to the crowd and examined for his sake. Wylie admires this and praises him for his openness:
He is a cadaver, dissecting himself in our sight; he is the god Atthis who was buried in Stetson's garden and who now arises to give us the benefit of an anatomy lesson.
Along these lines, as though he were giving us an "anatomy lesson" about his past, Wylie goes on to prove the validity of Eliot using his own experiences in this book:
I think that Mr. Eliot conceived 'The Waste Land' out of an extremely tragic emotion and expresssed it in his own voice and in the voices of other unhappen men not carefully and elaborately trained in close harmony, but coming as a confused and frightening and beautiful murmur out of the bowels of the earth.
Wylie goes on to explain that the lines the author produced were painful to him and that this can be seen in the words chosen, and even if these emotions were fabricated, the piece would still be wonderful, much like a choir sings their song or a stain-glassed window, as Wylie put it.

The next issue that was visited was the notion that Eliot was an intellectual snob of sorts, one that feels no depth of emotion or pain. This, of course, was refuted.
As for the frequently reiterated statement that Mr. Eliot is a dry intellectual, without dept or sincerity of feeling, it is difficult for me to refute an idea which i am totally at a loss to understand; to me he seems almost inexcusable sensitive and sympathetic and quite inexcusable poignant, since he forces me to employ this horrid word to describe certain qualities which perhaps deserve a nobler tag in mingling pity with terror. That he expresses the emotion of an intellectual is perfectly true, but of the intensity of that emotion there is, no my mind, no question, nor do I recognize any reason for such a question.
Many critics have concluded, though unfounded, that The Waste Land is nothing more than a display of "intellectual arrogance", but Wylie concludes the opposite and expresses much sympathy for Eliot's splay of emotion and hurt.

Overall, Elinor Wylie stamps The Waste Land with her utmost approval and refutes other less-enthusiastic authors, citing her claims that Eliot not only used his own painful experiences, but also gave himself up for our emotional entertainment. Wylie's argument is successful and also provides excellent insight to the author himself: T.S. Eliot.


More to come soon, including some examinations of the second section of the poem, so don't lose interest yet!