T.S. Eliot first published his infamous long poem, The Waste Land, in 1922. Writ
T.S. Eliot first published his infamous long poem, The Waste Land, in 1922. Written during the post-World War I era in England, the poem captures the sense of deep disillusionment and loss that stemmed from both the collective experience of the Great War and from Eliot’s own personal struggles.
At the time, Eliot was working at a bank in London, and his mental health seemed to be deteriorating. In the fall of 1921, he was granted sick leave and departed for a sanitarium in Margate. There, he worked intensively on the manuscript that he called He Do the Police in Different Voices.
The editorial process by which that poem became The Waste Land is the subject of much scholarship. He worked closely with fellow Modernist poet and expatriate, Ezra Pound, as well as his wife Vivien, as he revised it. Formally, Pound pushed Eliot in a more fragmented direction; Pound claimed later that he delivered the poem as if by Caesarean section.
Upon its publication, Pound declared that “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900.” Other writers disagreed. Many of the poems composed as counter-arguments to Eliot, however, including Hart Crane’s The Bridge and William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, were influential and have in their own way preserved the place of The Waste Land as an important piece of Modernist literature.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Rebecca Dunham.
For first-time readers of the poem, “T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land” by Tyler Malone, is a terrific introduction to what is happening in it.
If you are interested in seeing how the poem changed through revision, check out T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited and with an introduction by Valerie Eliot. It was published in 1971 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich of New York, New York.
Eliot wrote critical essays on topics relevant to our understanding of The Waste Land. You can find them collected in The Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Edited by Frank Kermode, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Finally, two recent books of note include:
Rasula, Jed. What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern. Princeton University Press, 2022.
Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Rebecca Dunham.
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were