Essay: Why Modernist Poetry Is What It Is.

This essay was in response to a question from my Goodreads Catholic Thought book club on why modernist poetry is the way it is, that is, lacking form and meter, lacking rhyme, and generally being different than the poetry from the past.  The question came from Kerstin who was responding to substack post from Anthony Esolen, who essentially says he dislikes modern poetry.

Kerstin Comment:

This morning's blog post by Anthony Esolen starts out like this:

“I, too, dislike it,” said Marianne Moore at the beginning of her own poem about poetry, and I’m afraid that I’d say much the same thing about most of the work that she and her modernist colleagues produced. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but first they gave up singing for saying, and then their successors often gave up saying for grunting, or for a sort of intellectual posing which is just another kind of grunting, the kind you do at a faculty wine and cheese affair to show other people that you, too, can be dull and fashionable all at once, and have nobody understand what you’re saying.

But directness and simplicity in verse can be great virtues, and the best poets avail themselves of it. “O how unlike the place from whence he fell,” says Milton, comparing where Satan is now to where he used to be. One sentence, one line, and that’s that. “’Tis new to thee,” says the elderly Prospero, sadly, when his daughter Miranda, marveling at the variety of human beings that she on their desert island has never beheld before, is overcome with wonder. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” says Henry IV, who got that crown by shady means, and has not found it all he had hoped for. “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” says Alexander Pope, and don’t our current elites prove him right!

YES!!!
I have no use for the linguistic contortions mis-categorized as "poems".
I once had a conversation with one of my husband's grand-nephews on poetry. He was a senior in high school then and expressed his dislike of them and had no use for them. I told him that this was not the fault of poetry, but of poorly chosen examples with which our education system tortures students. Poetry is the highest art of language, and a poet who understands his art expresses things clearly in the most beautiful language. If I have to contort my brain into a pretzel, it not only misses the mark, it is junk.
This is why I love it when we sing old hymns in church. The poetry is accessible to all and at the same time truly beautiful and it is this beauty that nourishes the soul.

My Response:

I guess he doesn't like Gerard Manly Hopkins then. Or TS Eliot.

His examples there that he likes are from narrative poetry. What he characterizes as not liking in today's poetry are typically lyric poetry. Narrative poetry usually will climax to a simple line that carries punch, just like in a novel. Like anything else, in the age you live in, there is too much to consider and evaluate. The good poems will rise to the top and the bad will fade. I bet I could pull up poems from Milton or Shakespeare's age that are awful. Actually I remember having to do a term paper of a poet who was obscure from Milton's time I think (can't even remember the name now) and it was an epic poem. It was terrible and the professor gave me extra credit for taking on such a huge and awful opus.

 

I have found MarianneMoore's poetry to be elegant. She's not Milton or Shakespeare or the best of her age (Esolen is also not comparing the same level of talent) but she's a good poet. Here's the poem he quotes.  "Poetry" by Marianne Moore.

 

Poetry

By Marianne Moore

 

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

 

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the

   same thing may be said for all of us—that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand. The bat,

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

 

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—

   ball fan, the statistician—case after case

      could be cited did

      one wish it; nor is it valid

         to discriminate against “business documents and

 

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,

   nor till the autocrats among us can be

     “literalists of

      the imagination”—above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness, and

      that which is on the other hand,

         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

 

Kerstin Response:

Manny wrote: "I guess he doesn't like Gerard Manly Hopkins then. Or TS Eliot."

I was actually wondering about that. We’ll have to see if these poets will show up in his blog.

 

My Response:

Anthony Esolen I believe is the editor of a magazine called Touchstone, and last year they had a major article of TS Eliot's The Waste Land. It was definitely a positive review and the article was so good I kept the issue. He didn't write the article but he is one of the major editors.

 

Give me a little time. I'm going to put together a post on why I think modern poetry has evolved to what it is. You may not still like modernist poetry but at least I think you'll understand the forces at play that shaped it.

###

First, let’s try to define the era of modernism.  Narrowly in literature it’s refers to works produced between the two World Wars.  Broadly, however, it goes beyond that.  While the subject matter and themes of post-World War II may have been different, the aesthetics were not too much different and part of it were a development from that before the war.  Post-Modernism is really not that much different from modernism, and post-modernism is usually categorized from the Second World War to the end of the 20^th Century.  What are we in now in the 21^st?  I’m not sure.  I’ve heard it referred to as post-Christian, which I detest, but, since we’re in the middle of it, a proper term has not been given to it.  Frankly the aesthetics of modernism stretches from the First World War to today.  And actually its roots go even further back into the middle of the 19^th Century.  Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Gerard Manly Hopkins are pre-cursors to modernism, at least in aesthetics. 

It’s hard to know exactly what Anthony Esolen is criticizing there.  His exemplars are from narrative poetry or from Shakespeare’s drama which intersperses poetry and speech.  Is his criticism that we don’t have narrative poetry in drama anymore?  Usually people who criticize modern poetry point to its the lack of form and meter as was more common before the 20^th century.  Robert Frost has narrative poems; TS Eliot wrote plays in verse.  Lots of examples of poems in traditional forms.  They are out there.  When people think of modern poetry, they think free verse, that is, the line simulating natural speech, and they think of nontraditional forms, if they employ any form at all.  This conception of modern poetry sticks out, but by no means is it absolute.  Why is the poetry that characterizes modernism the way it is?  I can think of four reasons: mass education, the addition of new genres, the aesthetics of alienation, and the evolution of intellectual history. 

1.  The 20^th century saw an expansion of people going to universities.  More people are learned today than ever before.  Literary writers are writing for a public that is more educated than ever before, on the one hand, but have differences of cultivation: lowbrow poems for high school educated or less, middlebrow for college educated, highbrow for graduate or more importantly for the specialized literature reader.  How do poets satisfy their readers?  For lowbrow, they might write a “Casey At the Bat” poem.  For a middlebrow a poet might go with a traditional form.  For a highbrow, a poet would want something different or complex or even just more elitist.  If you consider yourself highbrow—which is elitist, and frankly there is nothing wrong with that because it reflects a cultivation and expertise—you want something more sophisticated.  So where does the market go for this?  Well, there isn’t much of a market for poetry (and I’ll explain why in point number 2) to begin with.  So a poet either writes ditties for the common man to read or he writes nuanced poems for a more sophisticated market.  That’s how mass education has made poetry evolve.

2. The 19^th and 20^th centuries each had an innovation that effected the evolution of poetry.  The 19^th century saw the mass production of the novel.  The novel became the primary literary art form.  The public wanted novels; they wanted stories in a prose language.  It spoke more directly to a person.  Great writers that might have been poets, chose to become novelists.  So there was a reduction in the interest of poetry; there was a reduction in the talent pool for poets; there was a reduction in the need for narrative poetry.  Why write a narrative poem when you could write a novel or a short story?  The last major narrative poem that comes to mind is Tennyson’s Idylls of the King which was published in part between 1859 to 1885.  Writers just choose to not write in poetry.  Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings could have been an epic poem, might have been an epic poem if written in Milton’s day, but in the 20^th century Tolkien choose a novel form.

The 20^th century innovation which I think effected the evolution of poetry was the recording and radio transmission of song.  There was always song in the past, and poets emulated song in traditional forms, but the mass production and availability of songs made poets seek other forms to distinguish themselves for a more highbrow public.  Songs have rhyme and rhythm and fixed stanzas.  The mass dissemination of song form through records and radio in everyone’s ear made poets want to distinguish themselves from the common form.  If a song writer could write these verses, then why did you need a poet?  So poets wanted to differentiate themselves.  [By the way, as an aside, there is also a relationship between the novel and film and between painting and photograph.]  When Bob Dylan, a song writer, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, it was the ironic culmination of this relationship between poetry and song. 

3. This perhaps is the most significant reason.  The 20^th century changed life in ways that were unimaginable in earlier times.  Some of it started in the 19^th century but it really culminated after the First World War.  Beginning in the 19^th century we had industrialization.  Actually it started at the end of the 18^th century in some places, but it really took off in the 19^th.  With industrialization brought rural migration into cities.  What was once maybe 90% of people living in a rural environment became the opposite.  Disconnected from land and reliant on technology changed society from their roots.  Urbanization increased social tensions.  War was never a good thing, but with industrialization the ability to kill masses of people became easy.  There was always capitalism but industrialization made society more of a consumer society, which made people integrated into capital like never before.  Pervasive capitalism brought an opposite reaction of socialism and communism.  All of this caused dislocations, which made faith more tenuous.  I don’t want to say there was a total loss of faith—even today there are more people who believe in God than don’t—but faith became less integrated.  All of this added up to a sense of alienation.  And the alienation was perceived from all aspects of society.  Looking at it from a simple conservative/liberal perspective, the right felt alienated because of the loss of institutions, the left felt alienated because of capitalism.  That’s really simplified but you can see how everyone started to look through the lens of alienation.  We have that today.  Just listen to both sides of the political and social divide.  They may point to different sources of the problem, but everyone feels like the world has gone awry.

Given dislocation, artists required a new aesthetics.  True artists, whether consciously or unconsciously, shape their art to reflect their world view, Weltanschauung in German.  Compare the orderly structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, organized into circles and layers pointing to a harmony, with a Picasso painting, where the order of the subject has been disconnected and fractured.  Picasso is capturing the alienation, the disconnection, and the shift in Weltanschauung that has occurred through industrialization. 

4. A fourth variable that shaped modernist poetry is the intellectual history that runs parallel with the aesthetic changes in art.  From the middle of the 19^th century on we have scientism, psychology, evolution, the spread of liberal democracy and dissolution of monarchies, the spread of communism, the spread of colonialism, the fall of colonialism, the fall of communism, race theories linked to genetics, race theories not linked to genetics, the rise of the nation state, the rise of individualism, the rise of radical individualism, and a loss of faith in God where today we are now considered a post-Christian culture.  Certainly these effected the subject matter of poetry, but with such radical changes in worldview, in parallel with the radical changes in life initiated by the industrial revolution, writers, artists, and musicians strove to find new ways of expressing themselves.  The old ways didn’t satisfy or, more importantly, implied a continuity with the past that was manifestly fragmented or, at the most extreme, severed.  In the end this fragmentation accentuated the alienation from the changes caused by the industrial revolution.   You can see that I find the industrial revolution to be at the heart of the modern world. 

So what did this mean to the poet?  One thing it meant was that the old forms no longer reflected the current worldview.  Going from an agricultural, rural milieu to an urban and industrial based society meant the old forms no longer reflected the nature of life.  While the general population preferred (and still does) the benefits of industrialization, the artists knew that something was now disconnected.  Humanity was no longer living in a harmony with nature, with each other, and with God.  Where rhyme made sense, where order was a norm, it no longer was.  The foundations of order had shifted, and art reflected that shift.

In 1920, Ezra Pound, a close friend of TS Eliot, wrote a poem trying to capture the modernist poet’s worldview, a poem titled “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.”  Mauberly was an alter ego of the writer’s in the poem, trying to create poetry from the new state of his world.  It’s a long poem of mixed quality but Part II states what the new poet is looking to do.

II

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

 

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;

Better mendacities

Than the classics in paraphrase!

 

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,

Made with no loss of time,

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

As you can see and in sympathy with Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Pound is not exactly endorsing the modern world.  The “acceleration” of life in the modern world is a “grimace” in contrast to “Attic grace.”  Attic refers to ancient Greece.  The poem runs through history and when it comes the First World War, Pound writes this as Part IV but I’ll extend it into the first four lines of Part V because I think it’s the central theme.

 

IV

These fought, in any case,

and some believing, pro domo, in any case ...

 

Some quick to arm,

some for adventure,

some from fear of weakness,

some from fear of censure,

some for love of slaughter, in imagination,

learning later ...

 

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor” ...

 

walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie,

home to many deceits,

home to old lies and new infamy;

 

usury age-old and age-thick

and liars in public places.

 

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.

Young blood and high blood,

Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

 

fortitude as never before

 

frankness as never before,

disillusions as never told in the old days,

hysterias, trench confessions,

laughter out of dead bellies.

 

V

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization.

First, I hope you can see that a skilled poet can make great use of modern style.  That’s really good poetry.  Second, Pound captures the disconnect of the modern world.  The war, the industrialization, the money economy (“usury”), and the disillusionment with what the world promises. The new hero, Mauberly, is an alienated hero.  That’s what is at the heart of modernist poetry.  And this goes across all ideologies and belief systems.  Ezra Pound and TS Eliot are thought of as conservatives.  Flannery O’Connor was not a poet but her short stories are modernist stories.  She too was trying to capture this disconnect, this alienation.

So let me summarize.  There was already a shift with the novel toward prose, capturing the natural voice rather than an artificially contrived voice in meter.  The sound of rhyming quatrains in meter seemed fitted for a distant past.  Even when life started to become normal a decade after the First World War, musical recordings dominated the ears of the public.  A highbrow educated public who read poetry weren’t satisfied with poets imitating songwriters.  Fragmented lines and fragmented structures reflected the disconnect of modern life and the ever shifting intellectual theories, and it provided a level of sophistication that separated cognoscenti (people who are considered to be especially well informed about a particular subject or art form) from the general public.  A poet like William Butler Yeats started in the old form but he too felt the need to transition toward the modern, interestingly from his contact with Ezra Pound and from the ridicule of James Joyce who laughed at his old forms.  I don’t know if Yeats cared that much about Joyce’s comments, but he eventually felt he had to move toward a different aesthetic. 

There’s great poetry in modernism, just as there is great poetry in every age.  We live in an age where there is so much published—what, perhaps a thousand times more than in Shakespeare’s time?—that there is a heck of lot of poor writing out there.  The poor poetry, and the globs of it, can paint a negative perception.  When people ridicule modern poetry, they are usually pointing to the lesser works, works that are caricatures of a general style.  But there is a heck of a lot of good poetry too.  The great modernist poets I would list as TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, WH Auden, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin.  Other poets who were lesser in general but had gems I would point to Theodore Roethke, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop.  There are others.  These come to mind. 

Let me just end with one of my favorite 20^th Century poems, “In a Dark Time,” by Theodore Roethke.  Roethke suffered from bouts of mental illness, and he captured that alienation in this poem.

 

In a Dark Time

By Theodore Roethke

 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;  

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,  

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

 

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!  

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.  

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,  

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

 

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,  

And in broad day the midnight come again!  

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,  

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

 

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.  

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,  

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.  

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,  

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

   “What’s madness but nobility of soul/At odds with Circumstance?”  There is no better line that captures alienation than that, but, in the end, Roethke, through this mystical experience leads to a union with God.  It’s one of my favorite poems of all time.

###

Frances Comment:

Manny, when I think of poetry in connection with modernism, one poem always recurs to me. In it, Matthew Arnold makes his intellectual statement about life’s suffering by brooding on the sea. As he goes on, he enfolds us all:

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a great girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

— “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold

My Reply to Frances:

Francis, I was thinking of that poem too but I just couldn’t remember the title “Dover Beach.” I was thinking of including Arnold as a proto modernist but when I couldn’t remember that title I decided to not include him. Thanks.

Kerstin Comment:

Thank you Manny for this long explanation! You put a lot of thought into it. There are so many reasons why we live in a time of alienation from our true nature. From the perspective of aesthetics, we have experienced much fragmentation and ugliness, and this gets mirrored in all the arts. Often we don’t know anymore what true beauty is. Is it any wonder that the literary arts have reflected this?

 

Given the overwhelming mass production of books these days on one hand and at the same time the controlled marketing of carefully chosen titles on the other, that then become “bestsellers”, how is anyone to find the genuinely deserving article?

 

Our school system has been scaling down the arts for many decades. It used to be normal to have to learn by heart certain poems, to recite them when there was a fitting occasion . Or to compose a poem for somebody with a special birthday or anniversary. We don’t do these things anymore. I am always astounded how much my mother knows by heart, and she had an eighth grade education.

Frances Reply to Kerstin:

Kerstin, I agree so completely with everything you wrote. Ironically, when Matthew Arnold wrote “Dover Beach” (probably in 1851), he was grieving what he saw as the loss of meaning in the traditions of Western culture. And yet WWI hadn’t happened yet; Hiroshima hadn’t happened yet. In many ways, ‘’we are here as on a darkling plain,’’ too; without our Christian faith, we would be exactly where Matthew Arnold was.

My Comment:

By the way, that line from the Ezra Pound poem, "For an old bitch gone in the teeth," the "b" word is referring to a female dog, not a woman. I just want to make that clear.

 

When this conversation started, I couldn’t remember my favorite Marianne Moore poem, though it was sort of on the tip of my tongue.  I finally remembered.  It’s “What are Years?” and it has a religious theme.  Let me share it.

 

What Are Years?

by Marianne Moore

 

What is our innocence,

What is our guilt? All are

naked, none is safe. And whence

is courage: the unanswered question,

the resolute doubt—

dumbly calling, deadly listening—that

in misfortune, even death,

encourages others

and in its defeat, stirs

 

the soul to be strong? He

sees deep and is glad, who

accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment, rises

upon himself as

the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

in its surrounding

finds its continuing.

 

So he who strongly feels,

behaves. The very bird,

grown taller as he sings, steels

his form straight up. Though he is captive,

his mighty singing

says, satisfaction is a lowly

thing, how pure a thing is joy.

This is mortality,

this is eternity.

Marianne Moore was devoutly Christian, a Presbyterian her whole life.

Literature in the News: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the 100th Year Anniversary

It crossed my attention that the great T.S. Eliot poem, The Waste Land, had its 100^th anniversary of its publication this October.  I would like to commemorate the anniversary with two posts actually.  This post, and then I want to post one of my poetry analyses of a section of the poem.  Only a section.  The poem, which is divided into five parts, contains 434 lines, and I would add densely packed lines of meaning.  That’s just too much for one poetry analysis.

So in this commemorative post, I’d just like to summarize the importance of The Waste Land.  A place to start is perhaps from the Yale university site, Modernism Lab, a site devoted to modernist literature.  From their article, “The Waste Land,” by Pericles Lewis.

 

The Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist poetics, both for its broad symbolic significance and for Eliot’s masterful use of formal techniques that earlier modernists had only begun to attempt. The critic I. A. Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed.” Eliot later complained that “approving critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” Nonetheless, it was as a representative of a postwar generation that Eliot became famous. To compare Eliot’s comments on the poem with the way it was received illustrates strikingly the fact that, as William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put it, “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.” The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential statement of that crisis and the epitome of a modernist poem.

Let me use that passage to highlight the elements and significance of the poem.  The first thing to point out is that the poem had a great influence on subsequent poetry and literature.  It is a difficult poem to read for (1) it’s fragmentary style and (2) heavy use of allusion, often obscure allusions.  I will point out in my future post why both these elements of the poem’s style are important.  On the other hand, it can be an easier poem to understand because the lines are frequently, if not mostly, prosaic.  Concentrated lines that must fit meter, line length, and rhyme scheme sometimes can be difficult to unpack.  Eliot’s individual lines are simpler.  But the frequent dislocations between parts and subparts can leave the reader bewildered.  Modernism was looking for an aesthetic to convey the particular nature of our contemporary life, and Eliot’s poem and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, both published in 1922, are the two works cited that define Modernism.

Second, the poem captured the disillusionment of an age.  Eliot undercuts that thought in the quote inside that passage, but the central image of a waste land was perfect for capturing the post-World War I life.  It invoked the image of the trench warfare battlefield, desolated from destruction.  The war was devastating to the European nations, and it seemed like such a “waste” of a generation of men that the title rang perfectly true.  People were disillusioned in many ways, from the ideals of the war, from their governments, from life in general.  This disillusionment allowed the elements in the culture that were tearing down tradition (anti-religion, pseudo-psychology, anti-family—the same as now!) to establish themselves as normative.  The worst elements of the Enlightenment were disrupting society, and that causes disillusionment in one’s traditions.  The poem really did capture a disillusionment.  As an aside, it’s no better today, if not worse!

 

Third, the poem shaped literature for the next century, and still does.  There are countless references, allusions, and emulations to The Waste Land in novels, poetry, drama, and even film.  From poets.org, in their review of “What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern” the legacy of Eliot’s poem is summarized as such:

 

The Waste Land has a double legacy. It’s the milestone that vaulted its author to considerable fame and influence, culminating with the Nobel Prize in 1948. It has held a permanent place in the pantheon of modern poetry since its publication in 1922. It has been an intimidating lump in the syllabus for generations of undergraduates, and a chastening puzzle to graduate students. But The Waste Land is not only a poem; it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem unequivocal in its declaration that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.

 

It would be a major undertaking to detail the legacy of The Waste Land.  Novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Ford Maddox Ford, and more, would have strong allusions to the poem in their works.  Poets such as W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath owe much to the style and themes of The Waste Land.  Indeed, the very opening from traditional poetic forms can be traced to the poem.  In that respect, so much of the 20^th century’s poetry bears a direct influence to Eliot and his poem.  And in drama, let’s not forget that Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot owes much in theme and setting to the 1922 poem.

 

I should also mention that the title is The Waste Land, in two words, not “The Wasteland” as I have been historically prone to write.  Eliot himself was very specific about this.  From the website, T.S. Eliot:

 

The title, by the way, is not 'The Wasteland' but 'The Waste Land'. The only exact translation of the title is one which my French translator, Jean de Menasce, discovered, although alas! too late to use in his version – 'La Gaste Lande'. This is absolutely the exact equivalent as it alludes to the same mediaeval fiction.

 

(Eliot in a letter to Angel Flores, 22 February 1928)

 

Finally, here are some of my favorite passages from the poem.

 

From Part I, “The Burial of the Dead”:

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.  (ll. 19-30)

 

From Part II, “A Game of Chess”:

 

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam. (ll. 77-96)

 

 

From Part III, “The Fire Sermon”:

 

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.  (ll. 215-30)

 

From Part IV, “Death By Water”:

 

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.  (ll. 315-18)

 

 

From Part V, “What the Thunder Said”:

 

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses  (ll. 331-45)

 

 

If you haven’t read it recently (or ever!) you can read it at Poetry Foundation.

 

After reading it, then listen to what I consider the definitive rendition by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins.  Irons reads the male voices and the narrator’s voice while Atkins reads the female voices. 

 

 

 

Shantih, shantih, shantih.