‘The Wasteland’ T.S.Eliot Notes
By Lionel Trilling :: By Edgar Castle :: By Malcolm Bradbury ::::: Back to Wastelands Page
Extract from: Lionel Trilling’s commentary on ‘The Waste Land’

- it’s the most famous and influential English poem of our time -
its subject is ..... the nature of modern life

- T.S.Eliot himself recognised the difficulty of the poem and the necessity of dealing with it in a special way (he added pages and pages of explanatory notes)

- the best way to approach the poem is to begin by listening to it without any special effort to discover its precise significance
this poem was sometimes referred to as ‘the music of the age’

- voice plays a definitive part....we are aware of voices in the poem

- it can be likened to an abstract painting or an experience of actual music we perhaps find one passage or movement more meaningful than another, yet we may not be able to say what the meaning is

- it will always have some measure of mystery; it will hold back from us some secret - this element of mystery or secrecy is not a negative but a positive quality of ‘The Waste Land’

- when listening to it we are struck by the large variety of its vocal modes, its many different kinds of utterance - we hear speech that is sometimes grave and simple, sometimes lyric and tender, sometimes hysterical, sometimes toneless, sometimes questioning, sometimes awed; the utterance may be song... dialogue... prayer... command etc.

- from whom do these utterances come?
the poem is largely dramatic and it is not one voice that is heard but many voices - some are set off by quotation marks and some are not

- to many men the modern world has resulted in a dryness and deadness of feeling, a loss of the vital power of the primitive imagination


A poet of Social Concern’ by Edgar Castle

- first volume of poetry was published in 1917 during the war
- first major poem published in 1922 - now was tremendously respected
- awarded Nobel prize for literature in 1948

- Why is Eliot so important?
.......because he has something to say to us about ourselves
if he seriously puts in front of us a convincing picture of ourselves and our society, we begin to take notice

- a society is a hard thing to see as a whole
- sociologists, economists and historians analyse societies and statisticians can reduce it to numbers
- but it Eliot’s power to see it as a whole, and to represent it to his readers so that they can see it, and recognise it also, is extraordinary

- even when Eliot presents pathetic characters we find we cannot despise them because they are to us the twentieth century, trapped by triviality, but lacking in the confidence to try to escape

- Eliot doesn’t try to moralise - he draws the picture and leaves his readers to see how true it is

- many of his poems are written against the same kind of background
‘certain half-deserted streets....restless nights.......sleazy, run-down inner suburbs.....windy night-walks through city streets.....’ and so on
- the background is very suitable to the ghost-like figures, representative of modern man who flicker through his poems

- Persona..personae - the speaker/s in the poem
- in much poetry ‘I’ and ‘me’ means the poet himself
- in Eliot’s poetry it very rarely if ever does..he’s a ‘masked poet’
- usually the speaker in Eliot’s poems is a person invented by the poet

- ‘The Waste Land’ and other poetry by Eliot must be allowed to do its work on the reader, it cannot be analysed before it is understood....

- in the modern world we are used to abstract sculpture or painting
- all you need is to be receptive and not to demand that everything should be capable of being ‘put into your own words’

Notes from: ‘The Modern World’ by Malcolm Bradbury

- ‘The Waste Land’... a poem of 433 lines, and five sections
it covered 17 pages and had 7 more pages of added notes which have kept the scholars busy
- the poem that once and for all changed our idea of what to expect of a modern poem and a modern poet

- when I met him in the 1950’s I found him warm, courteous and friendly
- he was disinclined to talk about his own work but generous in his judgements on many younger poets
- he was formal, reserved, gentlemanly
- although he was American-born he had taken British nationality and spoke with a British accent

- when ‘The Waste Land’ was published, it produced a sense of shock, a feeling that the poetic tradition was being upturned
- there were those who found it totally obscure and difficult and others who found it arid, grim and prim - as some people found Eliot himself

- some critics recognized it as a work which belonged with Picasso’s art or with Stravinsky’s music or the fiction of James Joyce (all modern artists)
- Eliot was a masked poet, a poet of mocking disguises, a dramatic poet, a poet not of one but many voices - this was partly due to his temperament;
he was reserved, withdrawn and worked as a bank clerk

- 1921 was a year of drought in London, when no rain fell in the city for six months
- it was also a year of crisis for Eliot who was pressed by his work at the bank, money worries, and the growing mental disturbance of his wife, Vivien
- at this time he suffered from feelings of emotional emptiness and had a nervous breakdown
- he went to recuperate in a sanitorium where he wrote substantial sections of the poem

- the poet Ezra Pound gave him much advice and edited his manuscripts, in fact he reduced the poem to about half its original length-’il miglior fabbro’

- much of Eliot’s personal experiences went into ‘The Waste Land’ as well as the pain of the postwar world
- he died in 1965 and after his death his second wife Valerie declared that ‘He felt he had paid too high a price to be a poet, that he had suffered too much.’