As a writer, I often get inspired by the writings of those who have passed before me. Whether poets, journalists or book authors, I have always been inspired. I love all genres of literature and, once in a while, become obsessed with certain poets, such as e.e. cummings, Robert Frost and other similar poets. T.S. Eliot became famous as an outlandish poet, but later became the inspiration for the Broadway musical Cats, based on his work Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
Besides being a poet, he also published several collections of plays. including "Murder in the Cathedral." In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His primal scream, "The Wasteland" turned 100 years old in 2022.
Whoever coined the term Modernism for the artistic revolution unleashed by the 20th century must have thought the world was near its end. Otherwise, the term was doomed to anachronism as The New inevitably became old.
The world did not end (though not for lack of trying). Thus it has come to pass that the most Modern of all poems, “The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot, has reached the ripe old age of 100. Once scandalous and provocative, the work loomed for generations as a model of poetic obscurity - a notion that the best poems are the most difficult to understand. Today, “The Waste Land” is a lesson in creative alchemy, in which intimate feelings are transformed into a work that touches millions.
First published in the inaugural October 1922 issue of Eliot’s literary magazine, the "Criterion," “The Waste Land” was quickly recognized as a seismic event. Evelyn Waugh, a novelist of exquisite eye, re-created the force with which the poem landed. In Brideshead Revisited, his novel of 1920s Oxford, Waugh placed a sophisticated student of cutting-edge taste on a balcony, loudly declaiming lines from “The Waste Land” as crowds passed below.
“April is the cruellest month,” the poem began, with a sigh of weary nihilism.
Lovely April - cruel? Yes, because spring feeds life and life is spiritual torture, a march of dull souls trudging through brown streets, haunted by loveless marriages and sparkless trysts.
In “The Waste Land,” church bells sound dead. Birds sing into dirty ears. Rats drag their bellies through mud, and knowledge itself is but “a heap of broken images.”
Eliot’s timing was perfect. “The Waste Land” launched in a world thoroughly demoralized and disillusioned by World War I. All gods were dead, all faiths in man shaken, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously summed up the period. A two-volume slog called The Decline of the West bowed the bookshelves of countless intellectuals, assuring them that civilization was petering out and was about to come to an end.
The poem evoked this mood powerfully, but with an open-ended elusiveness that allowed readers to fill its gaps from their own wells of feeling. Eliot’s verse was hypnotic and entrancing - but also elliptical and enigmatic; its profundity seemed just beyond reach. No matter how urgently one pursued its meaning, the meaning always disappeared around the next corner.
Eliot cunningly reinforced this problem of comprehension by adding pages of unhelpful, even misleading, end notes. The effect was to put distance between the massively learned poet and the bewildered, intimidated reader.
Late in life, the poet acknowledged that “The Waste Land” was not his favorite work. But it was his biggest hit, boosting Eliot to a level of celebrity hard to imagine for a literary poet today. In 1956, 14,000 people packed the basketball arena at University of Minnesota to hear Eliot deliver a lecture on literary criticism.
During the past generation, as various troves of biographical material, long sealed, have been opened, scholars have combed the records for keys to this poem’s mysteries. What had been known only in outline - most ably drawn by the biographer Lyndall Gordon - has been filled in with vivid detail. Robert Crawford’s recently published Eliot After 'The Waste Land,' completes a comprehensive two-volume examination of the man; beyond that lies an ever-growing library of Eliot’s letters.
A shy and repressed young man - “very immature for my age, very timid, very inexperienced,” as Eliot put it in an unusually revealing statement unsealed in 2020 - used the outbreak of war in 1914 to cast off his American future as a dreary philosophy professor in favor of life as an English poet. “Because I wanted to burn my boats,” Eliot rushed into marriage with a bright but brittle English woman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom he barely knew.
Their life together was “agony” from the start. Indeed, it drove them both half-mad. Eliot escaped into work, a banker by day and literary critic by night, until he suffered a breakdown that sent him to a sanatorium in Switzerland. There, he compiled his personal pain into a draft of some 800 lines, which his friend Ezra Pound brilliantly cut by half, leaving a masterpiece.
In happier times, Eliot would describe “The Waste Land” as “just a piece of rhymical grumbling."
More accurately, it is the primal scream of a very private, very gifted writer trapped by his own fear-based choices. It is a roundabout confession and sublimated cry for help half-hidden by veils of erudition. Readers who also know fear and unhappiness sense the wounded voice of one small man behind the rattling thunder of the Modern epic. This connection of one human heart to another, across space and time, is the essence of art and its claim on permanence.
And that, I suppose, is the reason writers write in the first place. To find permanence.
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