The Waste Land (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 1922; vuoden 2002 painos)

I will take a brief look at Consider Phlebas and then at The Waste Land, followed by examples of how the latter informs the former.

Eliot was to tell the Paris Review that in the composition of the closing sections "I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying." There seems no reason at all why we should not take him at his word. Defensive modesty of this variety can often be worth noting; what critic has ever succeeded in getting any sense or any beauty out of the final pages? And in what conceivable universe—even the batty, sinister one of Ezra Pound, who insisted that the poem open in that manner—is April the cruelest month?

It is not disputable that by publishing The Waste Land when he did, Eliot caught something of the zeitgeist and enthralled those who needed borrowed words and concepts to capture or re-express the desolation of Europe after 1918... It is certainly the most overrated poem in the Anglo-American canon.

Look at it as a film scenario, which in many ways it resembles, and you can see that it goes much farther – with its jump cuts and flashes backward and forward and montages and intense economy – than anything by Truffaut or Godard or Fellini or Antonioni....

The twentieth century has seen bigger and more ambitious poems than The Waste Land – such as the Cantos of Pound, the Anathemata of David Jones, the Anabase of St-John Perse – but no poem has been a more miraculous mediator between the hermetic and demotic. It is, curiously when one considers the weight of polyglot learning it carries, essentially a popular poem, outgoing rather than ingrown, closer to Shakespeare than to Donne. It was Pound who said that music decays when it moves too far away from the dance, and poetry decays when it neglects to sing. The Waste Land sticks in one’s mind like a diverse recital performed by a voice of immense variety but essentially a single organ: it sings and goes on singing.