The Waste Land is a monument of Modernism and the most famous poem of the 20th century. It is also a notoriously difficult one. It is capable of moving readers very deeply, even when they claim not to understand it. One could think of it as resembling a work of music, touching the reader with its haunting sound and bringing together diverse motifs that carry contrasting charges of emotion.
The poem was published in 1922. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was published in the same year, which is often regarded as the high point of Modernism. It was not only in poetry and fiction that art was being transformed. One has only to think of Stravinsky and Picasso, or of the growing popularity of cinema and jazz. The Waste Land was not alone: Eliot was conscious of these other artistic experiments, of new poetry in other languages and of close friends similarly working to break the mould, outstandingly his friends James Joyce and Ezra Pound.
All these writers and artists were touched by feelings of despair and the loss of a coherent and unified culture. Europe was emerging from that orgy of self-destruction we call the First World War. Civilisation seemed to be breaking down. Borders were collapsing and monarchs falling. Europe was a waste land, like the Logres of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485) and Wagner’s Parsifal (1882). There was also an interior desert of faithlessness and emotional sterility, as in St Augustine’s wasteland of the self.
The course will begin by responding to the impact of The Waste Land before the process of interpretation begins. We shall among other things listen to Eliot’s own reading of the poem, which should remind us of the musical analogy. In the next four days we shall go through each of the five sections, reading slowly, analysing parts of it and picking up many of the references and allusions Eliot is notorious for making. We shall pick up certain passages that inspired Eliot – for instance in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, in Dante, in Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest and in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.—and return them to their context. We shall also look at some of the modern poetry and fiction of Eliot’s time that had an effect on him: at Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, for instance, and at Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We shall try to think of The Waste Land as a collage of references and as a mini anthology of passages. It is hoped that by the end of the week, we be able to see it whole again – and to hear it whole as well.
