Anyways, here it is.
Search #1: "the waste land"
The search produces 24.8 million results. Goodness gracious.
Did you mean: the wasteland? Hell no! There is a space between "waste" and "land", Computer, so stop asking me such petty questions!
Wait, wait, wait Why is there a spa—
Shut up and keep going, Taylor! Alright, alright...
The first listing is for The Waste Land as a hyper text. It looks promising, so I click on it; turns out to be the very website that we use to read it in class. Using this would be cheating and redundant, so I reluctantly moved on.
Wikipedia's listing shows next. Historical and biographical information is redundant and uninformative. Moving on...
Scrolling down the page, I see Answer.com's listing. Looks promising. Turns out to be a full transcript of the poem, so I become discouraged. Before I leave, however, I scroll down to the bottom of the page and find an article posted by Yale under the "Annotated versions" category. Decided to try my luck.
Eureka! A modernist take on Waste Land is found on the page. Skipping the biographical information on Eliot (which seems to be on EVERY site I visit), I look on to the first investigative section on the web page.
Interesting Fact: T.S. Eliot was high conscious of his touch with traditional literature. I can see all of your surprised faces, so let me get to the point: He wrote an essay on modernist poetry, entitled "Tradition and the Individual Talent", in which he basically states that poets of the form, in their most original states, are engaging in dialogue with tradition. What this says to me, basically, is that The Waste Land is, in its entirety, an amalgamation of old literature and their ideas. I was under the impression that Eliot had only crafted about half of his poem in this style, but after reading his essay, I can see that the text is comparable to a puzzle being pieced together with small bits from many texts to produce a larger, clearer image, even if it may only exist in the author's own mind. Perhaps you have already figured this out, but I still feel quite good about this epiphany...
Another interesting tidbit about The Waste Land is that the original name was intended to be "He do the Police in Different Voices", a nod to Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in which one of the characters reads police reports in the newspaper in varying voices. The article suggests that the entire poem is a focus on the different voices that appear throughout the text, something that I, as a reader, have certainly taken to notice. More important in focus is the second section of the poem, namely with the dialogue between the irate female and the apathetic male. In the article, Lewis (the author), provides this interesting insight:
The use of so many voices in this kind of collage allows the poet to distance himself from any single statement. As the critic Louis Menand has put it, “nothing in [the poem] can be said to point to the poet, since none of its stylistic features is continuous, and it has no phrases or images that cannot be suspected of—where they are not in fact identified as—belonging to someone else….. Eliot appears nowhere, but his fingerprints are on everything.”
He later goes on to recount that, "[a]lthough The Waste Land is, by Eliot’s own admission, a highly personal document, it also aspires to a certain kind of impersonality." This accusation of "impersonality" is, to me, helpful since it brings to focus Eliot's dodgery, much like a patient skirts his own personal issues when being interviewed by a psychologist.
A very last interesting fact that I happened upon was that Eliot did not believe in such a thing as "free verse" and even claimed (with Ezra Pound) that he was experimening with tedious rythyms and meters found in everyday speech. Interesting.
After a while, I decided to move on to another source and see what I can find.
Search #2: "understanding the waste land"
The search only yeilds a disappointing 4.73 million hits. Geez.
Also try: understanding the wasteland. What is it with this computer?
The first couple of listings are for a website with free school essays, so these prove to be no help, although I was looking for a paper to turn into my Logic class. (Joke.)
I scroll down some more and find more links. Nothing of significance catches my attention. After a couple of minutes, I become frustrated and take a shower.
Twenty minutes later: Frustrated still, I decided that I needed some Cookout (spicy chicken tray, anyone?)
Thirty-three minutes later: Refreshed and objective, I return to the computer, but Oh Dear! the room is awful messy! I vow to not to return to my school work until after this putrid mess is obliterated, despite my (non-existant) inner strife.
Thirty seconds later: Dear Goodness, are those all dirty clothes? They must be washed!
***
To spare you the details, I did not get back to searching for outside resources on the internet. I hope that you are not too disappointed with this outcome.
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