Notes on The Waste Land I'll assume that you have the Penguin edition of the poem ($7.95) and I'll refer to specific pages. However, any edition will do perfectly well. You can even read the poem online with hyperlinks of several sorts or without hyperlinks. Directions. First of all, turn to the poem (p. 55). Read it aloud. Let the words echo in your memory. Concentrate on small passages: the opening lines (1-7), the lines on Madame Sosostris (43-59), the scene in the pub (111-172), the story of Phlebas, the drowned Phoenecian sailor (312-321), the story of Christ's passion (322-330). Form a mental picture of Eliot's "Unreal city" (207); form impressions of its inhabitants. Pay no attention to the footnotes. Next, read Kermode's introduction. I will summarize a few issues below, but Kermode raises many others. Note any questions you have. You may want to hear Eliot read the poem too. An audiotape is available for purchase from HarperAudio, but they also make it possible to hear Eliot online. Then go back to the poem. Read it all the way through, but pause to check some of the footnotes (Eliot's and Kermode's). When do they help you, and how? Where do they distract your attention for no very good reason? What else would you like to know or say? Could you add a footnote anywhere? Kermode says quite a bit about Eliot's state of "nerves." The cover note says that Eliot finished the poem "while recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium." If you'd like to get a vivid, though somewhat unreliable, picture of the young Tom Eliot, rent the film Tom and Viv. (I'll show a clip when we discuss the poem.) Although Eliot probably wasn't such a cold-hearted husband, he was obviously under a considerable strain when he wrote The Waste Land. The Introduction. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) left a contradictory legacy: a great poem of doomed youth, written a few years after World War I, and a body of literary criticism which helped to shore up his own fame as a poet of unparelled difficulty. Writing seventy-five years after The Waste Land appeared in a small poetry magazine in 1922, the British critic Frank Kermode (born 1919) tried to explain the poetry and the criticism. He starts by observing that Eliot found his poetic voice at an early age (about 22), but lacked confidence and needed the guidance of a slightly older poet, Ezra Pound (1885-1967). Both Pound and Eliot "were fine readers, with minds prepared for poetry, resolved to make new the poetry of the present by understanding the poetry of the past" ("Introduction," xiii). Kermode quotes Eliot's desire "to regain, under very different conditions, what was known to men writing in remote times and in alien languages" (xx). The different conditions were those of twentieth-century culture, the age of Cubism and twelve-tone music. It's no surprise that Eliot is struggling to find the right words, and if the poem is ever merely "rhythmical grumbling" (xix), Kermode is surely right to recall Eliot's dictum: the reader has her rights too, or his, and is free to find a message. The Structure. Kermode admits that critics may have persuaded readers to find order where there seems to be only chaos. "The arrangements of images in The Waste Land (we came to agree) obeys the logic of the imagination" (xxi). The logic is that of poetic imagery and poetic myth. Your task in reading the poem is to see where he goes with the images. If he starts with spring and rain (l. 4), where does he go in the next four sections of the poem? Ask also what myth he follows. If there is a parallel to Virgil's Aeneid, as Kermode suggests (xxiii), does the modern poet visit anything like ancient Carthage, or the Sybil's cave, or imperial Rome? Try to map out the poem: Draw a grid with a column for each section of the poem and a line for each major image or mythic event. Bring your grid, and I'll bring mine. The Voices. Eliot's original title, "He Do the Police in Different Voices," is a reminder that we hear a number of different characters speak in their own voices. Get to know some of these characters or voices, including Marie in section 1, Lil in section 2, and Tiresias in section 3. Consider to what extent they are parts of a single, fragmented character: the poet, speaking as a representative modern man. Thomas Willard

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