[Harold bloom] t._s._eliot's_the_waste_land_(bloom(book_fi.org)

T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
Bloom’s
GUIDES

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The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
Edited & with an Introduction
by Harold Bloom
Bloom’s
GUIDES

Bloom’s Guides: The Waste Land
Copyright © 2007 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
T.S. Eliot’s The waste land / [edited and with an introduction by]
Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s guides)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 103) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9361-0
ISBN-10: 0-7910-9361-1
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965. Waste land. I. Bloom,
Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PS3509.L43W3816 2007
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Contents
Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 14
The Story Behind the Story 19
List of Characters 22
Summary and Analysis 26
Critical Views 53
Eleanor Cook on Maps of The Waste Land 53
Louis Menand on Nineteenth Century Style 57
Sandra M. Gilbert on Eliot’s Mourning of a Friend 68
Michael Levenson on Eliot’s Views of
Postwar London 74
Juan A. Suárez on the Meaning of the Gramaphone 85
Shawn R. Tucker on Anxiety in The Waste Land 89
Thomas Dilworth on Sex Between the Typist and
the Young Man 94
Camelia Elias and Bent Søerensen on
the Influence of Ovid 97
Works by T. S. Eliot 101
Annotated Bibliography 103
Contributors 105
Acknowledgments 108
Index 110

In his essay, “The Pensées of Pascal” (1931), Eliot remarked
upon Pascal’s adversarial relation to his true precursor,
Montaigne:
One cannot destroy Pascal, certainly; but of all authors
Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as
well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For
Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He
does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences.
Walt Whitman, too, is “a fluid, insidious element,” a poet
who “insinuates, charms, and influences.” And he is the
darkest of poets, despite his brazen self-advertisements and his
passionate hopes for his nation. Song of Myself, for all its joyous
epiphanies, chants also of the waste places:
Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
Of the moon that descends the steeps of the
soughing twilight,
Toss, sparkles of day and dusk—toss on the
black stems that decay in the muck,
Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.
No deep reader of Whitman could forget the vision of total
self-rejection that is the short poem, “A Hand-Mirror”:
Hold it up sternly—see this it sends back, (who is
it? is it you?)
Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth,
No more a flashing eye, no more a sonorous voice
or springy step,
Now some slave’s eye, voice, hands, step,
Introduction
Harold Bloom

A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater’s face,
venerealee’s flesh,
Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and
cankerous,
Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,
Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams,
Words babble, hearing and touch callous,
No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex;
Such from one look in this looking-glass ere you go
hence,
Such a result so soon—and from such a beginning!
Rather than multiply images of despair in Whitman, I turn
to the most rugged of his self-accusations, in the astonishing
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not
in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knotted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly,
malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous
wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness,
none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young
men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent
leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public
assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old
laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or
actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as
great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
The barely concealed allusions to Milton’s Satan and to
King Lear strengthen Whitman’s catalog of vices and evasions,
preparing the poet and his readers for the darker intensities of
the great Sea-Drift elegies and “Lilacs,” poems that are echoed
everywhere in Eliot’s verse, but particularly in “The Death of
Saint Narcissus,” The Waste Land, and “The Dry Salvages.”
Many critics have charted these allusions, but I would turn
consideration of Eliot’s agon with Whitman to the question:
“Why Whitman?” It is poetically unwise to go down to the
waterline, or go to the headland with Walt Whitman, for then
the struggle takes place in an arena where the poet who found
his identifying trope in the sea-drift cannot lose.
An answer must be that the belated poet does not choose his
trial by landscape or seascape. It is chosen for him by his precursor.
Browning’s quester in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
is as overdetermined by Shelley as Eliot is overdetermined by
Whitman in The Waste Land, which is indeed Eliot’s version of
“Childe Roland,” as it is Eliot’s version of Percivale’s quest in
Tennyson’s “The Holy Grail,” a poem haunted by Keats in the
image of Galahad. “Lilacs” is everywhere in The Waste Land: in
the very lilacs bred out of the dead land, in the song of the hermit
thrush in the pine trees, and most remarkably in the transumption
of Whitman walking down to where the hermit thrush sings,
accompanied by two companions walking beside him, the thought
of death and the knowledge of death:
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one
side of me,

10
And the thought of death close-walking the other
side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as
holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks
not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the
swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so
still.
The “crape-veil’d women” singing their dirges through
the night for Lincoln are hardly to be distinguished from
Eliot’s “murmur of maternal lamentation,” and Whitman’s
“tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang” goes on tolling
reminiscent bells in The Waste Land as it does in “The
Dry Salvages.” Yet all this is only a first-level working of
the influence process, of interest mostly as a return of the
repressed. Deeper, almost beyond analytical modes as yet
available to criticism, is Eliot’s troubled introjection of his
nation’s greatest and inescapable elegiac poet. “Lilacs” has
little to do with the death of Lincoln but everything to do
with Whitman’s ultimate poetic crisis, beyond which his
strongest poetry will cease. The Waste Land has little to
do with neo-Christian polemics concerning the decline of
Western culture, and everything to do with a poetic crisis
that Eliot could not quite surmount, in my judgment, since I
do not believe that time will confirm the estimate that most
contemporary critics have made of Four Quartets.
The decisive moment or negative epiphany of Whitman’s
elegy centers upon his giving up of the tally, the sprig of
lilac that is the synecdoche for his image of poetic voice,
which he yields up to death and to the hermit thrush’s song of
death. Eliot’s parallel surrender in “What the Thunder Said”
is to ask “what have we given?,” where the implicit answer
is “a moment’s surrender,” a negative moment in which the
image of poetic voice is achieved only as one of Whitman’s
“retrievements out of the night.”

11
In his essay on Pascal, Eliot says of Montaigne, a little
resentfully but with full accuracy, that “he succeeded in giving
expression to the skepticism of every human being,” presumably
including Pascal, and Shakespeare, and even T. S. Eliot. What
did Whitman succeed in expressing with equal universality?
Division between “myselfâ†œ” and “the real me” is surely the
answer. Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American, is
hardly identical with “the Me myselfâ†œ” who:
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come
next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and
wondering at it.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, looking with side-curved head,
both in and out of the game, has little in common with Walt
Whitman, one of the roughs, an American, yet almost can be
identified with that American “Me myself.”
II
The line of descent from Shelley and Keats through
Browning and Tennyson to Pound and Eliot would be direct
were it not for the intervention of the genius of the shores
of America, the poet of Leaves of Grass. Whitman enforces
upon Pound and Eliot the American difference, which he had
inherited from Emerson, the fountain of our eloquence and
of our pragmatism. Most reductively defined, the American
poetic difference ensues from a sense of acute isolation, both
from an overwhelming space of natural reality and from an
oppressive temporal conviction of belatedness, of having
arrived after the event. The inevitable defense against nature
is the Gnostic conviction that one is no part of the creation,
that one’s freedom is invested in the primal abyss. Against
belatedness, defense involves an immersion in allusiveness,
hardly for its own sake, but in order to reverse the priority of
the cultural, pre-American past. American poets from Whitman
and Dickinson onwards are more like Milton than Milton is,

12
and so necessarily they are more profoundly Miltonic than even
Keats or Tennyson was compelled to be.
What has wasted the land of Eliot’s elegiac poem is neither
the malady of the Fisher King nor the decline of Christianity,
and Eliot’s own psychosexual sorrows are not very relevant
either. The precursors’ strength is the illness of The Waste
Land; Eliot after all can promise to show us “fear in a handful
of dust” only because the monologist of Tennyson’s Maud
already has cried out: “Dead, long dead, / Long dead! / And
my heart is a handful of dust.” Even more poignantly, Eliot is
able to sum up all of Whitman’s extraordinary “As I Ebb’d with
the Ocean of Life” in the single line: “These fragments I have
shored against my ruins,” where the fragments are not only the
verse paragraphs that constitute the text of The Waste Land, but
crucially are also Whitman’s floating sea-drift:
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting
another.
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of
liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented
and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves
floating, drifted at random,
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud—
trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence,
spread out before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

13
“Tufts of straw, sands, fragments” are literally “shored”
against Whitman’s ruins, as he wends “the shores I know,” the
shores of America to which, Whitman said, Emerson had led
all of us, Eliot included. Emerson’s essays, Eliot pugnaciously
remarked, “are already an encumbrance,” and so they were,
and are, and evermore must be for an American writer, but
inescapable encumbrances are also stimuli, as Pascal learned in
regard to the overwhelming Montaigne.

14
Biographical Sketch
Thomas Stearns Eliot, the youngest of seven children, was
born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. His father,
Henry Ware Eliot, was the president of the Hydraulic Press
Brick Company. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, had
been a teacher and wrote poetry. Eliot’s paternal grandfather,
William Greenleaf Eliot, after graduating from the Harvard
Divinity School, went west and settled in St. Louis, where
he established the city’s Unitarian Church. Nevertheless, the
family’s roots remained in Massachusetts, where they spent
each summer. In 1886, Henry Eliot built a house at Eastern
Point in Gloucester.
Eliot grew up in two contrasting geographies and cultures.
The neighborhood in St. Louis in which the Eliots lived was
in decline, but because of their ties to the city, they did not
move to the suburbs as others of their class did. Thus Eliot
was familiar with the rundown streets of the city and the well-
to-do drawing rooms of his parents’ social circle. Similarly,
although he was raised Unitarian, his nurse, Annie Dunne, an
Irish Catholic, sometimes took him to Mass. These conflicting
influences are apparent in Eliot’s poetry, especially in The
Waste Land, where high and low dialects, popular and classical
culture, and upper and lower class characters are juxtaposed.
In 1905, Eliot left St. Louis and Smith Academy to spend his
last year before college at Milton Academy outside Boston. In
1906, he entered Harvard, where the intellectual and cultural
foundation of his poetry was laid. In his first year, Eliot was
put on academic probation for poor grades, but he went on to
complete his B.A. in three years and earned an M.A. the fourth.
Among his teachers were the philosopher George Santayana
and Irving Babbitt, an influential literary scholar and culture
critic whose conservative moral thought generated a movement
called the New Humanism. With Santayana he studied allegory
and read Dante in Italian; Babbit introduced him to Eastern
religion, Sanskrit, and French literary criticism. Both teachers
influenced Eliot’s own austere political and moral conservatism.

15
In 1909, in the Harvard library, Eliot came across Arthur
Symons’ book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, where
he discovered the work of the French poet, Jules Laforgue,
which exerted paramount influence in shaping the tone of
Eliot’s early poetry, including “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.” At Harvard, too, Eliot met the English philosopher
and mathematician, Bertrand Russell. In 1910, Eliot joined the
staff of the literary magazine, The Harvard Advocate. Within
the circle of its contributors, he broadened his knowledge of
contemporary poets and poetry, including the poetry of Ezra
Pound, who would shape The Waste Land. He also met the poet
and novelist, Conrad Aiken, then a fellow student, who would
remain a life-long friend and who introduced him later, in
London, to Pound.
Eliot spent the year after graduation in 1910 living near the
Sorbonne in Paris and attending classes in French literature.
He also attended the lectures of the philosopher Henri
Bergson at the College de France. At his lodgings, he developed
a close friendship with Jean Verdenal, one of his neighbors, a
medical student who was killed in the First World War and to
whom Eliot dedicated “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Before returning to the United States in 1911, Eliot traveled
through Italy and Germany and visited London. He had also
composed a number of his famous early poems including
“Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Rhapsody on a Windy
Night,” “Preludes,” and “La Figlia che Piange.”
Back at Harvard in 1911, Eliot began doctoral studies in
philosophy under a group of such distinguished philosophers
as Santayana, William James, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell,
and F. H. Bradley, who directed his thesis on Bergson. Also at
this time, he taught undergraduate courses in philosophy. Eliot
led a lively social life in Boston. He appeared in theatricals,
took dancing and skating lessons, attended concerts, and
began a romance with Emily Hale that seemed to be leading
to marriage until he abruptly broke it off in 1914 when he
returned to Europe, first traveling through Germany, Belgium,
and Holland, but, with the start of the First World War,
settling in England.

16
In London, during the summer of 1914, Eliot showed
Conrad Aiken, his friend from Harvard, some of his poems,
and Aiken showed them to Pound, who recommended them
enthusiastically to Harriet Monroe, now the legendary editor
of Poetry magazine. In June 1915, “Prufrock” appeared
in Poetry. “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
appeared in Blast, a magazine edited by the novelist and painter
Wyndham Lewis, in July. Later that year, “Portrait of a Lady”
was published by the avant-garde poet and editor Alfred
Kreymborg in Others. Eliot was granted admission to an elite
circle of writers, painters, editors, and patrons all dedicated
to modernity. At this time, Eliot was also enrolled at Merton
College, Oxford, studying Aristotle and, with Bertrand Russell,
logic.
In 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. It was a
disastrous marriage that began badly. Vivienne was an
exuberant and high-strung woman with a taste for gaiety and
an appreciation of Eliot’s poetry. His family opposed their
apparently impulsive wedding. Worse, Eliot was unable to
consummate their union and from the start of their marriage
they slept separately. Because they were poor, Eliot accepted
Bertrand Russell’s offer that they share his flat. Soon, however,
frustrated by a lack of affection from her husband, Vivienne
allowed herself to begin a relationship with Russell, of which
Eliot was jealous but also tolerant. When Russell broke off
the affair with Vivienne in 1918, it shattered her. By that time,
too, Eliot had grown colder to her, and her continuing affairs
with other men repulsed him. His entrance into the Anglican
Church, in 1927, sealed his determination to separate from her,
and in the autumn of 1932, when he was invited to deliver the
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry at Harvard, he left
for Cambridge without her. In February 1933, from the United
States, he ordered his solicitor in London to serve Vivienne
with separation papers, and from that time until her death in
1947, he refused to see her. Distraught and confused, Vivienne
was considered mad and was confined by her brother, with
Eliot’s permission, to a mental institution in 1938, after she had
been found wandering around the streets one morning at five

17
a.m. She died in 1947. In 1957, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher,
his secretary and forty years his junior. Their marriage was
apparently a happy one.
In 1916, Eliot completed his doctoral thesis for Harvard but
did not get his degree because he would not return to Harvard
to defend the thesis. He tried to earn a living by teaching
school, reviewing for magazines, and serving as the assistant
editor on a magazine called the Egoist. In that capacity, he
proofread James Joyce’s Ulysses, which the Egoist was publishing
in installments. In 1917, however, he was hired to work in the
foreign section of Lloyds Bank, where he remained for nine
years until 1926, when Geoffrey Faber hired Eliot as a literary
editor for his new publishing company, Faber and Gwyer
(which became Faber and Faber).
While he was establishing himself as a poet, Eliot cemented
his reputation as one of the most important literary and cultural
critics of his era with the publication of a collection of essays in
The Sacred Wood. Public fame and private distress went hand
in hand. In 1919, his father died before he and his son were
reconciled over Eliot’s emigration and marriage, and in 1921,
after a visit to his mother, Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown
and spent three months in a sanitarium in Switzerland. In
Switzerland, Eliot worked on The Waste Land. In Paris, he
showed it to Pound, who cut it into the poem it now is.
Schofield Thayer, a friend of Eliot’s from Harvard, at this time
was editing The Dial, a literature and arts magazine. In 1921,
he established the yearly Dial Awards of $2000 and in 1922,
he gave it to Eliot even before he saw the poem. He printed
the poem as the centerpiece of the magazine. The poem
caused a sensation with its modernist blend of jazzy erudition,
disjunction, and despair.
At the height of his fame, in 1922, Eliot was offered the
editorship of a magazine of his own by Lady Rothermere, the
wife of the publisher of the Daily Mail. As the editor of the
Criterion from 1922 until its final issue in 1939, just before the
start of World War Two, Eliot exerted a powerful influence on
poetry and thought. He published articles and the poems “The
Hollow Men,” in 1925, and “Ash Wednesday,” in 1930, the

18
poem that reflected his entrance into the Anglican Communion
in 1927. From 1936 to 1942, Eliot wrote the “Four Quartets,”
a series of four poems whose subject is the philosophical
consideration of time, reality, experience, and salvation. In
1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In addition to poetry and criticism, Eliot wrote verse drama.
Perhaps the best known is The Cocktail Party, a mixture of
Euripides and Noel Coward, which had a successful Broadway
run in the early 1950s. His other plays include The Family
Reunion, a modern version of Aeschylus’ Eumenides; Murder in
the Cathedral, about Thomas Beckett; a jazz play in fragments
called Sweeny Agonistes; The Confidential Clerk; and The Elder
Statesman.
During the final years of his life, Eliot produced little.
After his death, his once monumental reputation began to
decline, in part because his conservative, monarchist, and
sometimes anti-Semitic outlook became less acceptable than it
had been before the rise of German fascism, and simply because
taste in literature changes with cultural and social changes.
Nevertheless, Eliot’s critical influence is established and so is
his place as a poet. If he is no longer the principal English-
language poet of the twentieth century, he is still among the
chief poets of the first half of that century, the foremost of
those who reshaped poetry and made it new.

19
The Story Behind the Story
The Waste Land was published in October 1922, in The
Criterion, the magazine Eliot himself edited in England until
he closed it in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. The
poem’s first American publication was in The Dial, a few weeks
later. The poem was a sensation even before it appeared in
print. Eliot had been writing sections of The Waste Land since
his days at Harvard. The poet Conrad Aiken, a fellow student
at Harvard and a life-long friend, reported that he remembered
the lines, “A woman drew her long black hair out tight/ And
fiddled whisper music on those strings,” from the fifth section
of the poem, from their student days. The fourth section of the
poem, “Death by Water,” is in large part an English translation
of Eliot’s poem in French, “Dans le Restaurant,” published in
1920. Eliot began work on The Waste Land in earnest in 1919.
Much of the work was done late in 1921 while Eliot was staying
on the coast of Margate in England and then at a sanitarium in
Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was taking a rest cure after
suffering a nervous breakdown, following the death of his
father in 1919 and a visit, during the summer of 1921, to his
mother and sister in St. Louis.
When Eliot passed through Paris on the way to Lausanne
and on the way back to London from Lausanne, he and his
wife Vivienne stayed with Ezra Pound and his wife, Dorothy.
Pound looked at the poem on both occasions, and on the
second, sharply edited it, cutting away half of it and making
suggestions about the half that remained—essentially creating
from Eliot’s raw material the poem published in 1922. Pound’s
praise for the poem before it was completed gave it a buzz,
which extended to Eliot’s friend from Harvard, Schofield
Thayer. Thayer edited The Dial, published in Boston. One of
The Dial’s goals was to promote American writers and to extend
the influence of American writing. With those goals in mind,
Thayer had established the Dial Awards in 1921. Without
having seen a finished draft of The Waste Land, Thayer named
Eliot the recipient of the 1922 Dial Award and planned to

20
make the poem the principle work in the November issue of
the magazine.
When The Waste Land appeared it was met with the
excitement its promoters had hoped would accompany
it. Its spirit is one familiar in the period between the two
world wars: the disgust and despair with everything that
haunted the survivors of what Gertrude Stein called “the lost
generation.” The grim war behind them served as a harrowing
commentary on the empty lives and venal pursuits they saw
all around them. Its style suggested the new experiments
with structure, continuity, and point of view that were visible
in the paintings of Picasso and Braque and in such literary
works as the stories of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce’s Ulysses,
and the novels of Virginia Woolf. In addition, The Waste
Land combined overwhelming erudition with common, even
debased speech. Woven into one fabric were quotations in a
number of languages from the great literatures of the world,
and from pop songs and the music hall. The jumps from
section to section, however, caused some readers to wonder
if the threads of the poem really constituted one fabric. To
add to the complexity and impenetrability of the poem, when
it appeared in book form, Eliot added footnotes. They often
are as obscure as the poem itself, increasing the scope of
difficulty and suggesting the breadth of literary, philosophical,
anthropological, and religious scholarship the poem seems to
demand.
In 1922, Eliot sent the original manuscript drafts of The
Waste Land, the version of the poem that existed before Pound
edited it, to John Quinn in New York City. Quinn was a lawyer
whose avocation was collecting manuscripts, particularly of
the Modernist writers. He also was the source of the $2000
attached to the Dial Award granted to Eliot in 1922. When
he died in 1924, his daughter, Julia Anderson, inherited his
papers and kept them in storage. To the literary world and to
Eliot scholars, the original drafts of The Waste Land seemed
to be lost. In 1953, John Flick, a visitor to the home of Julia
Anderson’s daughter, Mary Conroy, to whom she had left
her father’s papers, noticed the manuscript on a bookshelf.

21
Although the Conroys were aware of it and of what it was, they
had never given it much thought. Encouraged by Flick, the
Conroys decided to give the manuscript and many other papers
in John Quinn’s collection to the New York Public Library.
They started cataloguing the papers and in the early sixties
began sending them from their home in California to John
Gordan, the curator of the library’s Berg Collection. Gordan,
out of respect for Eliot, who was still alive, did not make the
acquisition or the existence of the manuscript public until Eliot
died in 1965. Then Gordan sent a microfilm of the manuscript
to Valerie Fletcher Eliot, Eliot’s widow and his secretary,
and she put together an edition of the original drafts. It was
published as The Waste Land: Facsimile and Manuscripts of the
Original Drafts in 1971.
Just as the complete manuscript drafts of The Waste Land
made clearer the meaning and the method of the poem, so, too,
have the biographical details of Eliot’s married and emotional
life in the late teens and early 1920s helped to clarify certain
aspects of the poem. Even though Eliot was known to have
said that the poem represented his own grumblings rather
than a serious social critique, his primary aesthetic principle of
literature, that the poet should remove himself from his work,
made his observation seem like a tease rather than a serious
comment. Biographical scholarship emerging at the end of the
twentieth century, however, has focused on the unhappiness
of his first marriage, particularly on his own sexual impotence
and his wife’s nervous agitation and sexual promiscuity. These
factors illuminate, even while not entirely accounting for, the
personalities of the narrator and of the woman in the first part
of “A Game of Chess”—his diffidence and her high-strung
sensuality. Similarly, the intensity of Eliot’s friendship with
Jean Verdenal, who was killed in 1915 in the war, in Paris in
1911 may have affected the composition of “Death by Water”
and the mournful tone of the poem as a whole. Eliot used the
circumstances and the emotions of his own life to invent and
give vitality to images which were partially drawn from his own
experiences and yet reflected a world broader than his own
private one.

22
List of Characters
The Cumaean Sibyl appears in the epigram at the head of
the poem. A guest at a Roman feast in the satirical novel
by Petronius, c. 27–66 a.d., The Satyricon, relates her story.
Granted eternal life by Apollo, she neglected to ask also for
eternal youth and lived a life in death, continually withering
but never dying.
Ezra Pound, American poet, author of The Cantos, edited The
Waste Land, cutting it in half and giving it the shape and texture
that define it as the ground-breaking work it is. In recognition
of his craftsmanship, Eliot dedicated the poet to him, using the
Italian inscription translated as “the better craftsman.”
The poet narrator recites the poem, assuming many voices. In
his own voice, he seems to be an intellectual and ineffectual
man, tormented by a sense that history has run down,
civilization has decayed and that culture, while comforting to
his lonely soul, describes the failures and torments of mankind
but cannot bring salvation.
Marie is the poet’s first interlocutor. She tells him over coffee
of her past in Austria and of her cousin, who was the Archduke
Rudolph, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and how she
used to go sledding in the mountains.
Isolde, the heroine of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde,
is referred to in the quotation from the opera beginning at line
31. She falls desperately in love with Tristan, who had been sent
by his king, Mark, to bring her back to him as a bride. Tristan
falls in love with her, too, after they drink a love potion.
Madame Sosostris is a clairvoyant and tarot card reader, a
fortune teller. As she turns over the cards in her deck, she
introduces several of the characters present in the poem
through allusion:

23
The drowned Phoenician sailor refers to Phlebas the
Phoenician, whose death is the subject of the “Death by
Water” section of the poem.
The man with three staves, Eliot states in his notes, he
associates with the Fisher King, the impotent ruler of the
waste land, and the prevailing spirit of The Waste Land.
The one-eyed merchant is a figure that may be associated
with Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant in the third
section of the poem who propositions the narrator.
The Hanged Man, Eliot says, he associates with the
dying god and with the hooded figure in the last section
of the poem, that is with Jesus as he was after his
resurrection, when he appeared to some of his disciples
on their way to Emmaus.
Stetson is a figure the narrator encounters on London Bridge,
representing survivors of war.
“She” is the way Eliot identifies the wealthy and nervous
woman in the richly appointed salon that begins the second
section of the poem.
Cleopatra, the hot-tempered and volatile Egyptian queen,
as she is portrayed in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, is
present by allusion as a precursor spirit to the woman Eliot
refers to as “she,” because her chair is compared to Cleopatra’s
barge on the Nile.
Tereus and Philomela are pictured over the mantelpiece. In
the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of how Tereus raped his
wife’s sister, Philomela, and how he was changed into a hawk
and she into a swallow.
Gossip in a dive is an unidentified cockney women who tells
the story of:

24
Lil, a woman who has had five children and an abortion
and is old beyond her years. She would like to break off
sexual relations with her husband.
Lil’s husband is returning from the army and, according
to the Gossip, will be looking for “a good time” with
another woman if his wife is unavailable.
Barman calls out that the bar is closing as the Gossip tells her tale.
Ophelia is the young woman used by her father and spurned
by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, who dies by drowning. In the
poem, the goodnights the bar patrons exchange segue into her
last words in Hamlet.
Mrs. Porter is the keeper of a brothel in a bawdy song from
which Eliot quotes.
Her daughter is one of her prostitutes.
Sweeney, one of her clients, is a recurring figure in Eliot’s
poetry and represents a rather degenerate example of the
human species, governed by lust and greed.
Mr. Eugenides is the merchant referred to by Madame
Sosostris. He propositions the narrator.
Tiresias, to whom the poet compares himself and who, Eliot
explains is his notes, represents the point at which all the
characters in the poem converge, is a character from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses who existed serially as both male and female. In
his final embodiment as a male he was blind but had the power
of prophecy.
The Typist lives in a small bed-sitter.
The Clerk is a vain young man who visits her.

25
The Rhine Maidens, the spirits of the Rhine River from Richard
Wagner’s Ring Cycle, are parodied as Thames Maidens, the
spirit of the Thames.
Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite, Leicester, are imagined on
the Thames, contrasting the opulence of the Renaissance with
the industrial waste of Eliot’s time.
Saint Augustine, an early Church Father, is alluded to in the
line referring to Carthage. Augustine wrote The Confessions in
which he tells of his conversion from a dissolute youth to a life
of religious asceticism.
The Buddha’s sermon in which he spoke of everything being on
fire is referred to in the repetition of the word “burning.”
Roman soldiers are suggested by the allusion to “torchlight
red on sweaty faces” in the final section of the poem, which
presents the capture, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus in a
series of images and allusions.
The thunder is personified and made to speak the words of
Prajapati, the Hindu God of creation.
The Prince of Aquitaine is a character in a poem by Gerard de
Nerval, an early nineteenth-century French poet whom Eliot
quotes. The prince, like the poet/narrator, laments the fallen
glory of his condition by using the image of a fallen tower.
Hieronymo is a character in the Elizabethan revenge tragedy,
The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd. Eliot’s allusion suggests
the vicissitudes of his own emotional condition when caught
between the despair engendered in him by the waste land
around him and within himself, and the as-yet-unrealizable
possibility of salvation.

26
Summary and Analysis
I.
“What are the roots that clutch?” This is the central question
of The Waste Land. A challenge delivered at line 19 of the poem,
it states directly the problem the poem confronts throughout
its five cryptic, fragmented sections. Before Eliot begins to
answer the question at the end of line 20, he asks another,
related one. “[W]hat branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”
Using the images, “branches” and “stony rubbish,” he suggests
that the poem will examine people’s lives (branches) and the
culture (stony rubbish) in which they live. By yoking these two
images, Eliot shows their interconnection. How can “branches
grow” if “roots” cannot “clutch” because the soil is “stony
rubbish?” How can people live well if the culture is broken,
harsh, and cannot support them? Or, just as troubling, what
sort of “branches” can “grow” in a barren culture? How can
there be a civilization worthy of mankind and how can mankind
itself be whole, wholesome, and create a worthy culture, if the
environment in which it grows undermines life rather than
nurtures it? The branches that do grow, what sort of branches
can they be? The lives that are lived, what kind of lives can they
be? As a quest for a way out of the waste land of the world of
the early twentieth century, The Waste Land is a description of
that territory, and of the people who live in it and the quality of
the lives they live.
The answer to the question “What are the roots that
clutch?” begins on the same line the question ends. In the
question there is a suggestion of what the answer must reveal.
The problem the question implicitly establishes is “How can
rootlessness or uprootedness be repaired?” There must be
a nourishing ground to which the roots may clutch so that
the branches may grow. The answer the poem first provides
seems of little help. “Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess.”
It is a simple answer: “You” do not know the answer. “You”
are without roots and “you” do not know what might serve

27
for roots. There is a puzzle, a riddle, a problem which must be
solved. There is a mystery which must be encountered. Eliot
encountered it and accepted it soon after The Waste Land with
his entry into the Anglican Church—he abandoned the quest in
favor of submission to faith. Eliot decided, as he wrote in 1930,
in Ash Wednesday, that “Because I do not hope to turn again,”
he would not “mourn/ The vanished power of the usual reign.”
Before this epiphany, still in quest of meaning and not
knowing where to turn, in The Waste Land, Eliot pictures the
problem of the alienated, damaged, and lost person, living
in a wasted world and finding nothing: “What are the roots
that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?” He
seeks the answer in a similarly imagistic form and in a form
that is—because of the condition asserted in the question—
necessarily fragmented. All the poet has to gather an answer
from are fragments. The segmented, cubist-like, body of the
poem is the result. The fragmentation of the poem reflects the
fragmentation the poet experiences—the fragmentation of the
human consciousness, of human faith, of the time and of the
culture in which the poet lives. Eliot explores the problem by
examining it in three different environments, among the upper
classes, among the lower classes, and in the consciousness of the
pilgrim-poet seeking the mystery that can restore wholeness
and turn the waste land into a fertile soil. Eliot enters into the
fragmented regions of the poem and into these personae by
using a number of narrative voices differentiated by the variety
of dictions found in the poem. In addition, a number of other
poetic voices and allusions from other works thread through
the poem. Allusive scraps from Baudelaire, Wagner, Spenser,
Marvell, ragtime, Shakespeare, and Buddhist texts invest the
malaise Eliot is defining with breadth of field and depth of
focus. These allusions are transformed by their context into
resonances of the alienation Eliot anatomizes.
“You know only,” the poet asserts, “a heap of broken
images.” Images, not meanings, are all that is known. They
are “broken images” like the images in the cubist paintings
of the artists whose work is contemporary with his, Braque,
Leger, and Picasso. In their work, the image that makes up the

28
picture plane no longer resembles a coherent and organized
representation of something recognizable and meaningful.
Cubist painting presents a decomposed re-organization of
apparently incoherently arranged shards of things no longer
congruent with everyday perception. In a world that does
not make sense, how can a picture of that world, if it is to
be an accurate representation, make sense? The images in
those paintings and in Eliot’s poem reflect and represent odd
and oddly juxtaposed planes of being and experience, which
challenge our ability to make sense of what we see. From the
images that the poet gathers in The Waste Land in a series
of fragments, the reader may, like the poet, deduce their
insufficiency. The poet guides the reader through a world and
through a search for meaning, coherence, for something upon
which to rely. To begin to find meaning, the poet must guide
the reader outside that world, as he does in the fifth section
when he abandons western values for eastern ones. Before
attempting to find an answer, however, the poet must lead
readers through an experience that demonstrably convinces
them that the problem he decries—that the want of solidity, the
utter meaninglessness and rootlessness that he encounters—
really exists.
The Waste Land is a riddle the reader must unravel in the
quest to find “roots that clutch” and something that is more
than “a heap of broken images.” Yet, at the end of the poem,
the poet declares the quest has not quite been successful:
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” They are
not entirely worthless, but they are, still and all, fragments,
nothing solid, “stony rubbish” from which nothing can grow
rather than a rock upon which to build. And there are ruins,
the poet’s ruins, the edifice of himself that is no longer whole,
perhaps identical to the edifice of a culture which stands only
in decay. The fragments, the broken images are the remains
of something that was once, presumably, solid but is now in
ruins. The poet sees himself as a fragmented man, as ruins
not reconstituted but “shored up,” supported in his ruined
condition and kept from crumbling entirely by the fragments
he has gathered in the poem.

29
Between the poet’s first mention of “broken images” and
his last mention of “fragments,” he assembles a number of
fragments and broken images which constitute the poem.
The Waste Land presents itself to the reader as the remains of
a poem rather than as a complete poem, just as the culture
and the world it describes are only the remains of a culture
and of a world. The Waste Land as T. S. Eliot presented it to
Ezra Pound to look at, is not the poem which was printed
in 1922. Pound tore that original apart and struck out large
sections of it. What then began as a work that challenged the
unity of an ordered structure in its several sections, written
in a multiplicity of dialects, dictions, and meters, became a
fragment of itself, decomposed and left standing, deliberate
ruins with gaping spaces for the reader to look through and
beyond.
II.
The Waste Land presents itself immediately as a difficult
poem, blocking entrance with an epigraph in Latin and Greek
followed by a dedication in Italian. The dedication to Pound,
calls him “the better craftsman.” The epigram, from the
Satyricon of Petronius, alludes to the Cumaean Sibyl, the seer
who was granted a wish by Apollo and asked for immortality.
She neglected to ask for eternal youth. Her immortality thus
became a process of continual increased debilitation, and
her wish became a longing to die. Her condition reflects the
condition of the civilization Eliot leads the reader through in
The Waste Land, a culture of living death.
The Waste Land begins without any narrative explanation,
setting of scene, or introduction of speaker—without the kind
of helpful introduction Eliot provided, for example, in his
earlier poem, “Portrait of a Lady,” which opens with the lines,
“Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon/ You have
the scene arrange itself.” Eliot begins in the manner of one of
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. Someone is speaking.
Who? Or are there more speakers than one? The reader does
not know.

30
The first line, “April is the cruellest month,” takes hold
of the reader and does not let go. It is a simple and a baffling
assertion. It grips not because of an implicit reference to or an
apparent contradiction of the famous Chaucerian glorification
of April with its sweet showers at the beginning of The
Canterbury Tales. Or even because of the possible suggestion
that as we read The Waste Land, we, too, like the characters in
Chaucer’s poem, are setting out on a pilgrimage in search of a
martyr who may give life meaning. It astonishes because it is
such a simple and apparently false assertion that it makes the
reader wonder, why?
“April is the cruellest month” the poet asserts because,
he explains by an image, it breeds lilacs out of the dead land;
it brings life. Implicit is the suggestion that it would be
better to allow death to be final. But April undoes death by
reinstating life. What then is there about life that should make
it undesirable? The answer is that the process of revivification
mixes memory and desire. It causes the past and the future to
clash with each other in the as-yet-unformed and just-beginning
present. This juxtaposition has the effect of provoking longing.
It stirs dull roots with spring rain. Paradoxically, “Winter kept
us warm” because it covers “Earth in forgetful snow” and feeds
“A little life with dried tubers.” It seems that winter is as close
as one can get to death while still alive. It allows, if not death,
at least hibernation. Spring, in these lines, rather than being
glorious and full of hope, is a cause for alarm. The stirring
of life in an environment antithetical to life is painful. Dead
winter nourishes without arousing.
These seven lines form the overture of the poem,
introducing its themes. “Breeding,” “mixing,” and “stirring,”
all disturbing life processes, are highlighted by their placement
as the words ending the first three lines of the poem. This
introduction culminates in the final word of the fourth line,
highlighted by the fact that it is not a present participle, “rain.”
But rain, here celebrated by its terminal-line placement, will be
the one element missing and longed for throughout the body
of the poem. Lines 5 and 6 again end in present participles, the
more comforting “covering” and “feeding.” The section ends

31
with tubers, the buried food that just sustains the hibernation
until threatening life bursts forth again.
The overture slides into the first scene with the introduction
of a new speaker who is no longer the poet but an aristocratic
lady named Marie. The transition is smoothed by the
continuing reference to the characteristics of the seasons. From
an imagistic exposition, the poem moves to narrative.
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.
The abstract “us” of the fifth line now refers to the poet/
speaker and Marie, with whom he has a cup of coffee and who
takes over as the voice of the poem at line 12 with an assertion
of her pedigree: “I am not Russian. I come from Lithuania,
pure German.” And then Marie begins to reminisce:
When we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Taken literally, this fragment of a conversation Eliot
actually had with Countess Marie Larisch, niece of the Austro-
Hungarian Empress and cousin of the Austro-Hungarian
Crown Prince Rudolph—who killed his mistress and himself at
his castle in Mayerling under murky circumstances in 1889—
reflects her regret at a lost world. Marie had been the lovers’
go-between and was disgraced after their death when her role
was discovered. But her words suggest the spiritual condition
of the era: the malaise described in the overture. Implicit in
“When we were children” is a fatal strain of nostalgia. “We”
are no longer children with cousins who are archdukes; the
Austro-Hungarian Empire was destroyed in the cataclysmic

32
First World War. The joy of abandonment when the thrill of
rushing downhill in the mountains through the snow on a sled
is all the sensation there is, and the fright that comes can be
overcome simply by “hold[ing] on tight” is a lost delight. To
reflect that “In the mountains, there you feel free,” indicates
that “you” are oppressed now with a sense of not being free and
have, in consequence, withdrawn from the world of experience
to the world of contemplation, “read[ing] much of the night,
and go[ing] south in winter.”
The question, “What are the roots that clutch?” cuts into
this scene as a commentary upon it as well as a universal,
overwhelming question. Here is rootlessness. In this reflective
recitative between the arias, Eliot presents the landscape of the
wasteland. It is a terrain “where the sun beats, /And the dead
tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, /And the dry stone
no sound of water.” The third in this string of images alludes
to the miracle in the desert when Moses, leading the Children
of Israel out of Egypt and into the promised land, struck a
rock and brought forth in the arid terrain a gush of water. By
contrast, only a waste land, not a promised land, extends before
us. Additionally, although God is often represented as light, as
in the opening of the third book of John Milton’s epic poem,
Paradise Lost, light here is presented not as an illumination but
as a presence that scorches and makes a desert. The sun beats
and there is not even the sound of water no less water itself.
Eliot offers the picture of a present where neither past nor
future can relieve the intensity of its barrenness. The present,
consequently, is a terrain free from April’s cruelty: there is
neither memory nor desire. “Only,” the poet indicates, there is
a sort of relief, but not of a nourishing sort. Relief lies “under
the shadow of this red rock.” If one follows the speaker’s
invitation to “Come in under the shadow of this red rock,”
then there is something to be seen, something horrifying—an
image representing the modern world the poem is attempting
to conjure up and from which it is attempting to separate the
reader.
The poet indicates what there is to be seen “under the
shadow of this red rock” by contrasting it with what will not

33
be seen. It is “something different from either/ Your shadow
at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening
rising to meet you,” from either memory or desire, from either
past or future. It is the eternal present of the human condition:
“fear in a handful of dust,” for all we are is a handful of dust.
The condition of that dust is determined by the spirit which
animates it, the spirit which, The Waste Land declares, in the
present is a decaying, sickened one.
At the heart of that sickness is the culture of romantic love,
which makes a cult of love and death, yokes them together,
and is essentially barren. The apotheosis of its expression can
be found in Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, which
Eliot evokes by the premonitory four lines beginning “Frisch
weht der Wind,” sung at the beginning of the music drama, as
the lovers begin their journey to fatal love and inevitable death.
“The fresh wind blows in the direction of home. My Irish girl,
do you know,” the ominous question is as much directed at the
reader now as at Isolde, “where you are heading?”
From the realm of myth and hyper-reality, Eliot segues to
the present with a monologue like Marie’s. A woman recalls
a romantic tryst. “â†œ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;/
They called me the hyacinth girl.’â†œ” There is a tone of dancing
innocence in her voice, fitting, as she is identified with a
flower, a sort of grace of nature, but something plaintive and
desperate is mingled with her liveliness. The flower represents
a mythological figure, Hyacinth, who was accidentally killed
when the discus thrown by Apollo, the god who loved him,
accidentally veered off course, or was deliberately made to
do so by Zephyr, the West Wind, who was jealous of their
closeness, and killed him. From his blood sprung the flower.
In his use of hyacinths, then, Eliot is alluding again to a love
mixed with death and to rebirth. In response to “the hyacinth
girl” the narrator laments,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

34
He is caught in a twilight state, unable to speak, benumbed,
“neither/ Living nor dead,” knowing “nothing.” “Looking
into the heart of light,” does not illuminate, just as the sun’s
blaze earlier only parched. All he experiences from the sensual
arousal is silence. Eliot ends the section with a confirmation of
despair, reverting to Tristan by using the image of a desolate
and empty sea, “Oed’ und leer das Meer.”
III.
The scene shifts to the parlor of a fortune teller who
reads tarot cards, Madame Sosostris. In a decaying culture,
where people are caught in an abandoned present between a
past whose meaning is lost and a future that offers no hope,
superstition trumps faith and anxiety accompanies every action.
The fortune teller, despite her reputation—“known to be the
wisest woman in Europe with a wicked pack of cards”—herself
is sick. She has “a bad cold.” Whose fortune she is telling,
we are not sure—perhaps the poet-narrator’s. But she turns
up a series of cards, each suggesting aspects of the themes of
darkness, decay, and death. There is a drowned Phoenician
sailor, a man with three staves, a one-eyed merchant, a
mysterious, blank card representing “something he carries on
his back,/ Which I am forbidden to see,” and, present by its
absence, the Hanged Man.
Central to The Waste Land is the story of the Fisher King
that appears in the medieval romances concerned with the
quest for the Holy Grail, a bowl thought to be the vessel from
which Jesus drank his last cup of wine and in which Joseph of
Arimathea caught the blood dripping from his wounds as he
hung upon the cross. Lost thereafter, the bowl became the
object of a quest narrated by several medieval authors and
undertaken by several knights in the various Grail texts. The
quest for the vessel came to symbolize a spiritual quest. In the
course of the quest in these narratives, the knights discovered a
land under a terrible enchantment, condemned to barrenness.
It was ruled over by the Fisher King who was presented as
similarly cursed. He was either wounded or sterile, or even

35
dead in his life. And his blighted condition was the cause of his
kingdom’s blight.
In appropriating this story as an underlying motif for his
poem, Eliot also appropriated the interpretation of the story
set forth in a study by Jessie L. Weston called From Ritual
to Romance. Weston argued that the Grail story represented
primitive fertility rituals. Through the yearly rite, coordinated
with the changing seasons, of killing the king and installing
a new king and of mourning a dying god and celebrating a
god newly born, people sought to influence their own fertility
and the fertility of the land. It is a motif readers will be most
familiar with in the legend of King Oedipus of Thebes and in
the Christian drama of the crucifixion and the resurrection of
Jesus. In The Waste Land, Eliot is describing a time after the old
king has been killed but before the new one has been born.
Through the symbolic images on the tarot cards, especially
the man with three staves and the hanged man, Eliot introduced
the dominant image of The Waste Land, the wasteland itself.
The man with three staves represents the Fisher King himself,
Eliot wrote in a series of “Notes on ‘The Waste Land,’â†œ”
attached to the end of the poem, not because of anything
inherent in the image but because, Eliot said, he made the
association “quite arbitrarily.” The hanged man, Eliot noted,
is “associated with the Hanged God” whom Sir James Frazer
defines in his classic encyclopedia of fertility mythology, The
Golden Bough, as a fertility god who is sacrificed in order for his
resurrection to restore fertility to his land and his people. Thus
in the sequence devoted to Madame Sosostris and her tarot
pack, Eliot deepens the fundamental problem of the poem.
There is a spiritual barrenness in the world. The man with
three staves represents the impotent king. The force necessary
for fertility, the hanged man, representing the fertility god, is
missing. The closing line of the section reflects not just the
morbid sensibility of the fortuneteller but the reality of the
forsaken world Eliot is presenting: “One must be so careful
these days.”
Until the conclusion of the first section, the focus of the
poem has been on the ruminations of a solitary speaker lost

36
in a decaying, desolate landscape, or it has been on scraps of
conversation between people at a loss—in a café, in a room off
a garden, at a fortuneteller’s. In the final stanza, Eliot presents a
garish picture of London as an “Unreal City,” where “A crowd
of people flowed over London Bridge.” The city is peopled by
a crowd of living corpses compared, by allusion, to the damned
in Dante’s hell, “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Like the damned “each man” has his eye “fixed … before his
feet.” There is no hope, nothing to see. Even the church bell
when it rings the hour has “a dead sound on the final stroke of
nine.”
In the crowd, the speaker spots “one I knew” and addresses
him. It is a comrade from the war, but “Stetson” was with him
“in the ships at Mylae,” in the Second Punic War, not on the
battlefields of Europe in the First World War, which had ended
hardly three years before the actual time of the poem. The
battle of Mylae took place in 260 b.c. off the coast of Italy. In
that battle, the Romans struck a decisive blow against Carthage.
The temporal disorientation confounds the idea that there is
material progress through history and reinforces the emptiness
of experience that is at the heart of the poem. Moreover,
through the conflation of two wars separated by more than
twenty centuries, the problem of the barrenness of the land
seems to be attributable to an element in people themselves;
although time has progressed, human behavior and the human
experience remains fixed.
“That corpse,” the poet then asks the comrade he has
stopped, “you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to
sprout? Will it bloom this year?” The joke, comparing a corpse,
suggested by either of the wars looming in the background of
the poet’s consciousness, to a seed, is a bitter one. Yet it is, after
all, the miracle of the resurrection that turns a corpse into a
seed, whether in Christian or Pagan mythologies. And that is
what the poet is waiting for, the end of the blight of barrenness
and the return of fertility. But in the apparently nonsensical
doggerel, “O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,/
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” the obstacle to both the
resurrection and to the return of life and fertility is suggested.

37
The brute within the human—“the dog that’s friend to men”—
digs up the corpse and insures the continuation of barrenness.
The section ends with Eliot’s challenge to the reader to
identify with the malaise he is describing when he echoes
the final line of the introductory poem to The Flowers of Evil,
a collection of poems expressing disgust with mankind and
the human condition by the nineteenth-century French poet
Charles Baudelaire, “You! Hypocritical reader, my double, my
brother.”
IV.
The second section of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,”
opens on a scene of diffuse and frustrated sensuality inside a
luxurious but claustrophobic salon. Eliot describes its surface in
all its overwhelming sensory richness. A woman sits on a chair
that is like a “burnished throne.” It “glowed on the marble.”
A mirror, a “glass,” was “held up by standards wrought with
fruited vines.” A cupid “peeped out” from behind the vines,
and “Another hid his eyes behind his wing.” The two cupids
represent the contrasting attitudes with which the reader can
come to the scene, voyeurism and the repression of the desire
to look. Shame and ostentation are mixed as are a sensual
impulse and a chaste avoidance of the power of sensuality.
Flames, reflected in the mirror, rise from a “sevenbranched
candelabra.” Jewels glitter in satin cases and the scent of
perfume spills into the air from “vials of ivory and colored
glass.”
In this room of stifling opulence was hung a painting of a
woodland scene depicting the rape and mutilation of Philomela
by Tereus. It is a grim and brutal tale Ovid tells in the sixth
book of the Metamorphoses.
When the Athenians were attacked by barbarous tribes,
Tereus, King of Thrace, came to their aid. In gratitude,
Pandion, king of Athens, gave him his daughter Procne in
marriage. After a year, she gave birth to their son, Itys. Several
years later, Procne told her husband how much she missed her
sister, Philomela, how pleased she would be if Tereus would

38
sail to Athens, implore her father to let Phelomela visit her,
and bring her sister back to Thrace. Everything was done as
she wished, except that when Tereus saw Philomela he was
overcome by an overpowering desire for her. In Thrace, before
returning to his palace, Tereus took Philomela into the forest,
raped her, cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling of
what had happened, and imprisoned her in the forest. He told
his wife her sister had died at sea and hoped that would be the
end of it, but Philomela gave an attendant a cloth into which
she had, in symbols, woven the story of her rape and indicated
by signs to give it to her sister. Seeing the cloth, Procne
understood what had happened.
On the evening of the festival of Bacchus, the god of wine,
when women worked themselves into a frenzy, Procne went
out into the forest and tore down the gates of Philomela’s
prison. Together they plotted revenge. Stifling her motherly
compassion, Procne slaughtered her son Itys, roasted his flesh
and served the dish to his father. When Tereus tasted the dish,
he was so delighted, he summoned his son to partake of it,
too. Then his wife told him it was Itys he was eating. Enraged
he attempted to slay Procne and Philomela, but as they fled
his sword they were transformed, Procne into a nightingale,
Philomela into a swallow. Tereus became a hawk.
Eliot’s description of the room is enclosed in the violent and
deadly force of passion. It begins with an allusion to Cleopatra
and her barge, for “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished
throne,/ Glowed on the marble,” echoes Shakespeare’s
description of Cleopatra sailing on the Nile, where “The barge
she sat in, like a burnished throne,/ Burned on the water.” It
ends with a picture of the rape of Philomela. The idealized
romanticism of Tristan and Isolde is now brutalized. The illness
of passion is shown in the violence of desire and its barrenness
in the way it leads to the devouring of progeny.
But that is merely the background. These allusions
constitute “withered stumps of time.” They are the anterior
decorations adorning the present, which is lost in the boredom
that oppresses the soul trapped between “memory and desire.”
The woman in the room is haunted and unnerved by the

39
frustration of everything vital and by the over-stimulating
vacuity of the environment. “[H]er hair/ Spread[s] out in fiery
points/ Glow[s] into words,” but “then would be savagely still.”
The image representing a woman goes from the voluptuous
Cleopatra to the brutalized Philomela to the deadly Medusa
with snaky hair, who turned men to stone when they looked at
her. When the woman does talk, the rhythm is staccato and she
is shown as nervous, insistent, and desperate.
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
The voice of her interlocutor is the one which returns in
each scene with the same listless despair, a man of weak stone,
lost and impotent in his response to every situation. He answers
her frenzied questioning with bitter, resignation, “I think
we are in rats’ alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones.”
They talk across each other, yet the response of each is oddly
appropriate for the utterance of the other. Her frenzy provokes
his distance, and his remoteness exacerbates her nervousness.
“â†œ‘What is that noise?’â†œ” she asks. “The wind under the door,”
he answers, as if calming a child’s fears. But nothing eases her
and she keeps tearing at whatever she can. “â†œ‘What is that noise
now? What is the wind doing?’â†œ” And he responds with the same
dogged patience one uses when speaking to someone who is
unrelentingly demanding and chronically insatiable, “Nothing
again nothing.” His response nourishes her irritation” “â†œ‘Do/
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember/
Nothing?’â†œ” Her question resonates beyond their conversation
and suggests both the impotence and disengagement at the
heart of the poem—his own comment at line 40 after the
scene in the hyacinth garden, “and I knew nothing,” and the
terrible dialogue between King Lear and his daughter in the
first scene of Shakespeare’s play, when the repeated use of the
word “nothing” becomes the prelude to the death of a king and
the decay of social order. His response, “I remember/ Those

40
are pearls that were his eyes,” hearkens back to the scene with
Madame Sosostris, the tarot reader, who in describing “the
drowned Phoenician Sailor,” said the very same thing.
The words are Shakespeare’s. They come from a song in The
Tempest that the spirit, Ariel, sings in the mind of Ferdinand,
who believes he is the only survivor of a shipwreck in which his
father was drowned. Perhaps like the Phoenician sailor? The
words suggest, however, not only death but rebirth because
Ferdinand’s father has not been drowned: The shipwreck in The
Tempest is illusory. It has been created by the magician Prospero
in order to reveal to the voyagers the corrupt condition of
their lives and to engineer his own return to life after being
cast out of his kingdom and left to die on a barren island. By
allusion to The Tempest, Eliot makes Shakespeare’s play into a
metaphor for the condition described in The Waste Land. Our
lives are depleted and we are on the verge of shipwreck. But
we are not really shipwrecked. The barrenness of the world,
the impotence of its creatures is an illusory reality. It is caused
by an obstruction of vision, which is the result of a passionate
attachment to desire.
As if to illustrate the tenacity with which the insufficient
world grasps, the woman continues her insistent nagging.
And yet the question pains because it pierces. “Are you alive
or not?” Inside The Waste Land, it is, in fact, difficult to say.
Moreover, to illustrate the insufficiency of the world and
how little support the culture of the past affords the present,
after the woman’s second assault, “Is there nothing in your
head,” the man, who had been reflecting on the cycles of birth
and death suggested by The Tempest, devalues everything by
showing what is in his head—Hamlet’s dying cry of “O O O
O,” followed by a culture-busting, hit song from 1912, called
“That Shakespeherian Rag.” It begins, “That Shakespeherian
rag—/ Most intelligent, very elegant,/ That old classical drag.”
There seems to be nothing that will sustain, and the woman in
her final desperate cry expresses that:
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

41
With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?”
Her defeated and impotent interlocutor responds with
resignation that they will go through the motions of life—“The
hot water at ten./ And if it rains, a closed car at four”—awaiting
death, the “knock upon the door.”
From the boredom and desperation of an elegant salon, Eliot
shifts to a dive where he presents a scene in which a cockney
woman is telling another woman about her conversation with
a third woman whose husband is “coming back” from the
war. Unlike just about everything preceding it, the scene is
a straightforward melodramatic narrative about the sexual
tribulations of a woman who has had five children and an
abortion, who is old at thirty-one, and who is still expected
to be sexually available and alluring to her husband. It is
delivered by an unsympathetic narrator who relates that she
told the woman of whom she’s gossiping, “if you don’t give it
him, there’s others will,” implying herself. The conversation
is interrupted several times by the barman’s cry “Hurry up
please it’s time,” indicating the bar is closing. The repetition
gives the barman’s last call a deeper resonance. The story
finally is cut short by the closing cry and the section ends
with the goodnights of the patrons sliding into the last words
Ophelia speaks in Hamlet before her death by water, “Good
night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night,”
reinforcing the suggestion of a greater finality than just the
end of an evening out at the pub, and once again, also, the
inextricability of love and death.
V.
If The Waste Land seems to lack coherence because of its
fragmentation, approaching it the way one approaches a piece
of music may help to give it the structural coherence that
makes a work of art aesthetically satisfying. The poem is filled
with repetitions, allusions, and quotations, the way a jazz tune
is peppered with references to other tunes and to itself, or the

42
way a classical Theme and Variations uses and revises core
material to form a complex entity varied in color, emotion, and
dynamics but unified by the underlying core material that is
variously worked out.
The third section, “The Fire Sermon,” for example, after
all the desperate turbulence of the previous section, begins,
like an elegy, on a note of dark introspection: “The river’s tent
is broken; the last fingers of leaf/ Clutch and sink into the
wet bank. The wind/ Crosses the brown land, unheard. The
nymphs are departed.” There is an air of tranquility about
these lines. They offer a description of a deserted riverbank. In
the context of the dry and barren landscape of The Waste Land,
the riverside, at least, ought to be a fertile area. Yet the nature
of its fertility betrays the possibility of renewal. It is a perverse
fertility out of which nothing grows but rot.
Eliot transitions from the moody opening lines to a grim
description of the river by passing through a quotation from a
wedding song by the sixteenth-century English poet Edmund
Spenser. The refrain “Sweet Thames run softly till I end my
song” taken away from its original text and applied in this new
context reflects sharply the contrast between Spenser’s fertile,
springtime riverscape and Eliot’s barren riverside. Spenser’s
world is alive with nymphs, flowers, bridal couples, and glories
all brought together by the poet, despite his own sense of
dejection, to celebrate meaningful marriage in a fecund world.
In The Waste Land, “A rat crept softly through the vegetation/
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank.”
The poet sets himself at the river’s edge and merges
thematically with the impotent Fisher King of the Grail legend,
the man with three staves from Madame Sosostris’ tarot pack,
and Ferdinand from The Tempest. He muses “upon the king my
brother’s wreck/ And the king my father’s death before him,”
and thinks about the death of kings, the disintegration of order
that implies, and the consequent loss of meaning in life. From
a description of the eternal landscape of decay, the poem slips
into the internal mindscape of the poet who imagines death as
“White bodies naked on the low damp ground/ And bones cast
in the low dry garret/ Rattled by” the sound “of the rat’s foot.”

43
The recurring rat embodies the deadly plague destroying the
human spirit.
These ruminations give way to a burlesque of Andrew
Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” where the pressure of
eternity is replaced by the insistent pace of industrial society.
“But at my back from time to time I hear,” not “Time’s winged
chariot,” as in Marvell’s poem, but “The sounds of horns and
motor cars.” And what this technology brings is not love but
love’s debasement, “Sweeny to Mrs. Porter in the Spring.”
Their liaison is celebrated in an allusion to an obscene ditty
about a brothel keeper and one of her “girls,” which Eliot
sanitized: “O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter/ And on
her daughter/ They wash their feet in soda water.” After an
ironic juxtaposition of an image of children singing and the
reiterated allusion to the plaint of Philomela after her rape and
mutilation by Tereus, Eliot offers two illustrations of what he
presents as examples of the sexual degeneracy which defines the
sterility of the age.
The first scene is set “Under the brown fog of a winter
noon” in the “Unreal City” of London, as “Mr. Eugenides”
solicits the poet for a weekend sexual rendezvous belying his
name and representing the sterility of the age. In “The Burial
of the Dead,” London was unreal because it was a city of
living corpses mechanically pursuing their daily tasks. Now it
is unreal in the sense that its inhabitants are out of touch with
the fundamental reality of “The ancient pulse of germ and
birth,” in Thomas Hardy’s words. The second instance shows
that sterility in a heterosexual encounter. Amid the difficulties
and narrative disjunction of The Waste Land, like the scene in
the working-class pub, here is a coherent and straightforward
narrative.
After a day of mechanical work that turns the human
organism into a machine, a “human engine … Like a taxi
throbbing waiting,” a typist returns to her flat and prepares
dinner. Her underwear is drying on the windowsill, and the
divan upon which she sleeps is strewn with other intimate
apparel, like her stockings. Eliot evokes a tawdry eroticism
in this scene, in contrast to the suffocating suggestion of

44
unsatisfied sensuality he presented in the first part of “A Game
of Chess.” A young man arrives who is described as “A small
house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,/ One of the low on
whom assurance sits/ As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
His conceit and his appetite, after dinner, do not require that
the typist respond to his advances but simply that she does
not repulse them. After their alienated sexual exchange, he
leaves, “grop[ing] his way, finding the stairs unlit,” signifying
the condition of moral and vital darkness in which he lives,
and she looks in the mirror, adjusts her hair, says to herself
she’s “glad it’s over,” and diverts herself by “put[ting] a record
on the gramophone.” This sexual encounter represents the
debasement of the fundamental model of love and fertility.
It is neither an act of procreation, nor a ritual performed
ceremoniously for a fecund earth, nor even the expression, as
in the story of Tristan and Isolde, of turbulent human passion.
It is an egotistical assertion of barren self on the clerk’s part and
an instance of the habitual submission on the typist’s. Like the
machines they have become, their intercourse is mechanical.
The narrator/poet embeds himself, although only an
observer, in this scene, calling himself Tiresias. In the notes he
added to the end of the poem, which are often as opaque as the
poem they are presumably intended to clarify, Eliot identifies
Tiresias as “a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’…
yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all
the rest.” Eliot continues, giving a unifying principle to the
entire poem, by saying, “Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller
of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is
not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the
women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias.
What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” Thus
the poem represents the narrator’s awareness of his anguished
relation to history, to culture, to time itself, whether to the
crumbled past, the infertile present, or the hopeless future,
and to all the human failings he documents. What Tiresias sees
in this scene is one of the highest examples of human contact
debased into the lowest example of barrenness, selfishness, and
alienation.

45
The figure of Tiresias is a fitting emblem of a point into
which all other points converge and merge because of his
peculiar fate. The story of Tiresias is told in Book Three of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After striking two intertwined snakes he
had come upon in the forest, Tiresias changed from a man into
a woman. Seven years later, he again came upon those snakes
similarly intertwined, and, striking them again changed back
from woman to man. When the gods, Jupiter and Juno, were
arguing once about who takes more pleasure in the act of love,
Juno saying men, Jupiter saying woman, they decided to call
upon Tiresias, who had been both sexes, to settle their dispute.
To Juno’s consternation, he sided with Jupiter. As punishment,
Juno blinded him. Although no god is able to undo the work
of another, to counter Juno’s punishment, Jupiter conferred
on Tiresias the ability to know the future. Thus he was a blind
seer. Because he is blind, thus powerless, yet able to see the
truth, Eliot makes Tiresias the image of the impotent poet
trapped in the waste land.
The poet segues from the scene of dismal intercourse
between the typist and the clerk back to the barren world of
London and into the tormented inner mindscape of his own
forlorn consciousness by bleeding the music of the gramophone
record into Ariel’s music from The Tempest, which accompanies
Ferdinand’s reverie on loss. “This music crept by me upon the
waters” and then “along the Strand” and into the city, past the
dives and to the grand church of Sir Christopher Wren, St.
Magnus Martyr. In the midst of all the decay that edifice, not
a ruins, represents an “Ionian splendor,” not only in terms of
its columns but in terms of the echo of ancient Greece. The
historical and architectural coherence of this church endows
the church with the suggestion of an inherently consoling and
guiding power which nothing else in the poem shares. As yet in
Eliot’s own life, in 1922, it is only a harbinger of the religious
dedication that will culminate in his entrance into the Anglican
Church in 1927, which can be seen as his way of freeing himself
from the despair of the waste land of the contemporary world.
The third section ends with a shift from narrative
descriptions of alienation to a lyrical lament for the modern

46
condition. Derived from the song of the Rhine Maidens in
Wagner’s Das Rheingold, “The river sweats/ Oil and tar” is
almost pastoral in its calm depiction of things that fire the
furnace of industrial society. It is a background without any
human figures. This tableau vivant of the river at the beginning
of the twentieth century fades into a historical memory. Eliot
pictures Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite, the soldier-
courtier, and sometimes her political opponent, Robert, Earl of
Leicester, sailing on the Thames and flirting. It is an image of
frustration. Elizabeth’s private affection for Leicester and her
role as queen were in conflict. Moreover, she never married
and she gave birth to no children.
Eliot ends the section with a tram ride through a dusty
landscape to a rendezvous and with sexual debasement, which
results in both guilt and indifference: “He wept. He promised
a new start…. What should I resent?” That episode leads to
an allusion to Saint Augustine’s description of being in the
grip of unholy sexual passion and surrounded by lust upon his
arrival in Carthage and to the Budhha’s condemnation of lust
through the quotation of the four times repeated word burning
in the Budhha’s Fire Sermon, an instruction, like Augustine’s
Confession, in asceticism.
VI.
The brief fourth section, “Death by Water,” the section
that Ezra Pound said was essential when he was editing The
Waste Land, is a memento mori. It is a reminder of death and
the fulfillment of Madame Sosostris’ warning at the end of
the first section when she connected the drowned Phoenician
sailor with the poet—“Here, said she/ Is your card”—and with
Ferdinand in The Tempest, by the allusion to “Those are pearls
that were his eyes.” Now the Phoenician sailor is dead, and
Eliot uses his death to remind us of death: “O you who turn the
wheel and look windward,/ Consider Phlebas, who was once
handsome and tall as you.” To warn those who suffer the death-
in-life that Eliot has been portraying may be the one antidote
to that condition. Death itself is the agency for bringing forth

47
the recognition of the sacredness of life which may not be
wasted in the barren landscape and the meaningless pursuits
Eliot has described.
VII.
From the contemplation of human mortality Eliot moves,
in the final section, to the death that gives mortality its terror,
the death of God. That death renders both human life and
human death meaningless. Achieving a sense of finality through
the repetition of the word, “After,” Eliot recreates the prelude
to the crucifixion and its aftermath. “The torchlight red on
sweaty faces” suggests the betrayal of Christ when the Roman
soldiers come to take him. “The frosty silence,” refers to
Christ’s pain in the garden of Gethsemane. “The agony in
stony places” suggests Christ’s agony bearing the cross; the
“shouting and crying,” the pain of the crucifixion then and now.
The crucifixion itself represents the mythological slaughter of
God that Eliot had referred to earlier. But without a culture
meaningfully attuned to the values of the Christian sacrifice,
whose customs and ceremonies, to use the words of W. B.Â€Yeats,
are corrupt, the ritual of resurrection that concludes the death
of god does not occur: “He who was living is now dead/ We
who were living are now dying.”
As in a piece of music where themes are stated, developed,
and then climactically recapitulated, the final section of The
Waste Land brings back the earlier elements. After the drama of
the death of God in the first stanza, Eliot introduces a lament
on the loss in the lines beginning, “Here is no water but only
rock,” recalling line 24 and the parched desert wanderings of
the Children of Israel in Deuteronomy, when Moses struck a
rock and a stream of water flowed from it. But that was in a
desert where the spirit of God was present. The waste land is a
waste land precisely because of the absence of the Divine spirit.
The rock yields no water.
If The Waste Land can be thought of as having a plot, it is
that God has died and mankind, in consequence, has become
barren and the earth is a waste land where nothing can be

48
nourished and grow. At line 360, however, Eliot changes the
story and offers a possible hope. With the question, “Who
is the third who always walks beside you?” Eliot hints at the
answer to his first question, “What are the roots that clutch?”
and offers, too, a possible way of thinking about the waste land
that offers a way out. In his notes, Eliot wrote that the seven
lines beginning with the question on line 360 “were stimulated
by” an account of an Antarctic expedition during which “the
party of explorers … had the constant delusion that there was
one more member” among them than their actual number. A
more significant reference, however, is to the final chapter in
the Gospel of Luke, particularly to the story of the journey to
Emmaus, verses thirteen to thirty-five.
In the first twelve verses, Christ’s followers came to the
sepulcher after the crucifixion and discovered the rock
rolled back and “found not the body of the Lord Jesus.” In
confirmation of this resurrection, verses thirteen to thirty-five
tell the story of two of Jesus’ disciples on their way to the town
of Emmaus. They encountered a third person who walked
beside them on the way. It was Jesus risen, but they did not
recognize him. When they arrived in the village, the three sat
down together to eat. Jesus broke bread and gave it to them
“[a]nd their eyes were opened and they knew him.” The last
seventeen verses show Jesus resurrected, assuring his disciples
of his resurrection.
Within the context of The Waste Land, the allusion to the
journey to Emmaus signifies 1) that the dying god has, in fact,
been reborn and 2) that his apparent absence—the cause of the
barrenness of the waste land—is not the god’s actual absence but
mankind’s inability to recognize him even when he is present.
This insight can be transformative, for it suggests there must
be a way to develop the ability to see the divine. It leads in
the next verse paragraph, beginning “What is that sound high
in the air,” to overt lamentation. The “Murmur of maternal
lamentation” indicates a shift of attention away from the
impotent and half-dead father to the mother alive with grief.
In the next line, because of their proximity to the image of the
grieving Mary, “the hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless

49
plains, stumbling in cracked earth/ Ringed by the flat horizon
only” become objects of pity. They are no longer the images
of alienation that the crowds swarming over London Bridge
had been at the end of the first section. And then the violent
history of western civilization is encapsulated in the image of
ruined cities as they are catalogued, “Falling towers/ Jerusalem
Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London.” All of them are “Unreal.”
The retreat from the violence of history and the barrenness
of the present is contained in the word “Unreal.” The things
that are and that are unsatisfactory are “unreal.” Reality exists
on another plane of perception. The plane of perception that
appears to the senses is a disturbed one which Eliot shows in its
phantasmagorical madness in the stanza beginning “A woman
drew her long black hair out tight/ And fiddled whisper music
on those strings.” This image and the ones that follow show
humanity mesmerized by demonic powers, like the Medusa,
and transformed into blood-sucking monsters, like the “bats
with baby faces,” through a destabilizing sensuality.
Confronting the horror, not just the barrenness of modern
life, breaks the dry spell. A cock crows in line 393, representing
the prelude to the crucifixion and the betrayal of Christ by
Peter, whom Jesus foretold would betray him three times
before the cock crowed. The line signifies not only the denial
of God but the dawn of a new consciousness that may break
the barren spell and restore fertility: “In a flash of lightning.
Then a damp gust/ Bringing rain.” The landscape has changed
from the desert waste land of Western Europe to the jungle of
India, where the holy river, Ganges, is low and “black clouds/
Gathered … over” one of the Himalayan mountains. The
scriptural focus has also changed from Christian to Hindu as
Eliot alludes to a fable from the Hindu holy scriptures, the
Upanishads.
In this story, gods, men, and demons ask Prajapati, the
Creator, to teach them what is necessary to know. He repeats
the syllable, “DA” to each. It is, like The Waste Land itself, a
fragment open to interpretation. The gods interpret it to stand
for the word, “Datta,” give alms; men, “Dayadhvam,” have
compassion; demons, “Damyata,” practice self-control. Each

50
injunction becomes a defining theme which Eliot explores in
a series of images. The essential nature of giving is surrender,
“The awful daring of a moment’s surrender/ Which an age
of prudence can never retract/ By this, and this only, we have
existed.” The text is ambiguous. Is the moment’s surrender
a surrender of divine imprudence, which gives the self to the
eternal? Or is it the imprudent surrender to desire, which locks
one in this illusory world?
For compassion, Eliot imagines “each in his prison,” after
his own particular key has turned and locked him into his own
self-defined imprisonment. Imprisonment signifies coming
upon the person one really is and whom one has desperately
attempted to avoid confronting. To represent such a person in
such a condition, Eliot alludes to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the
overly proud Roman military hero who turned against Rome;
he was humbled in his pride and overcome by his enemy. The
despair that has been the on-going response throughout the
poem to the misguided living dead is replaced by compassion.
For self-control, Eliot uses the image of a boat responding
“Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar.” To that he
compares a heart longing to respond, “beating obedient/ To
controlling hands.” Only through disciplined obedience to a
controlling force, the poet assets, can the demonic powers that
shipwreck us be stilled.
Before the concluding verse paragraph, Eliot has achieved
knowledge of what is necessary for salvation, for extricating
himself from the waste land. It is the discipline implicit in the
three DAs and the act of putting himself in “controlling hands”
which can command a heart and make it beat obediently.
But knowledge of what is needed is not the same as attaining
what is necessary. And the last stanza of the poem, a rondo
of allusions, is a lament and a prayer rather than a crossing
over into a new land. Additionally, the focus is more on the
poet himself, rather than on his milieu. This suggests that the
entire poem may be understood as a depiction of the poet’s
own troubled soul constructed from the fragments of images
gathered from the world around him. The poem, then, as Eliot
suggested, really is an anatomy of “Tiresias,” that is, of the

51
poet, but through indirection. It is as if a painter were to paint
a self-portrait not by painting his face but by painting what his
face sees, by identifying himself through the identification of
what surrounds him.
“I sat upon the shore,” Eliot writes, focusing on himself,
“Fishing, with the arid plain behind me.” “Behind me” suggests
both geographical and spiritual position. The arid plain is
behind him the way one might say an unhappy event is “behind
me,” after it is finished. “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”
he asks then, as if he were making preparation for death. Death,
according to the dominant myth of The Waste Land, is the pre-
condition for life: the god dies so that the god can be reborn;
the seasons of the earth’s fertility turn: the earth dies so that it
can be reborn and produce a new harvest. Thus the final images
that swirl through the last lines of the poem suggest destruction
prior to reconstitution. The nursery rhyme, “London Bridge is
falling down falling down falling down,” appears, recalling the
crowd of the living dead who “flowed over London Bridge”
at line 62. At the end of the poem, there is a vision of the
destruction. The apocalyptic nature of that destruction is
reinforced by the next line, from Dante’s Purgatory, “Then he
dived back into the fire that refines them.” Purgation of sin
through a refiner’s fire is a precondition for emerging from
the condition of death-in-life that Eliot has been describing.
It becomes clear, too, that the condition of death-in-life is the
state of sin.
In the next line, “When shall I be as the swallow,” Eliot
recalls the central sin of The Waste Land, the rape and
mutilation of Philomela by Tereus, the speaker longing for
his own metamorphosis, like Philomela’s transformation into
a swallow. His final depiction of himself is as a prince whose
tower is ruined. He is an impotent man, like the Fisher King.
But the poet has collected the fragments which constitute the
poem in an effort to support his ruins: what is left to him will
not crumble entirely. But as The Waste Land ends, alluding to
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the poet senses the return
of madness, that he has not transcended his condition or his
era. He repeats the instruction for salvation of Prajapati, give

52
alms, be compassionate, be controlled, and ends three times
repeating the Hindu word “Shantih,” which Eliot states in his
notes signifies “the peace which passeth understanding.” He
uses this word as a sort of prayer, a dona nobis pacem, uttered
from the depth of his despair, rather than as a description of a
condition he has attained.

53
Critical Views
Eleanor Cook on Maps of The Waste Land
The Waste Land requires three maps for its place-names. One is
a map of Greater London and the lower Thames, for the poem
is a London poem even in its final form. One early plan, as
Hugh Kenner has argued,1 conceived of Part III as a vision of
London through various Augustan modes, making of the city
almost another character, and suggesting a geographical unity
as focal point for the poem. At this stage, says Kenner, “the
rest of the poem seems to have been planned around it [Part
III], guided by the norms and decorums of an Augustan view of
history” (p. 35). Then Eliot wrote Part V, the vision of an urban
apocalypse became dominant, and Part III was cut accordingly.
The Waste Land is not only a London poem; it is also a
European poem, or more precisely a Mediterranean poem.
It was always so through the early drafts, and it became
noticeably so when, in Part V, London was listed as the last
in a series of five great cities, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria,
Vienna, London. The poem therefore requires a second map
for those place-names that are not from the London area,
leaving aside the names of Ganga and the Himavant. If those
place-names are plotted on a map, they may be seen to ring the
Mediterranean in the following sense. The northerly names
are not seen as centers, in the way our twentieth-century eyes
see them. Rather, they balance Carthage and Mylae to the
south, and Jerusalem and Smyrna (now Izmir) to the east. This
map coincides roughly with the Roman Empire at its most
expansive, and therefore also coincides roughly with the theater
of war during World War I. The center of this second map is
Rome.
This leaves us with the names of Ganga and the Himavant.
The map that is useful here is a very simple and a very
symmetrical one: it is Dante’s map of the inhabited world.2
The exact center of this world is Jerusalem. Ninety degrees to
the east is the eastern limit, the mouths of the Ganges, which

54
is also the eastern limit of The Waste Land. Ninety degrees
to the west is the western limit, Gibraltar or the western end
of the Mediterranean, which is also the western limit of The
Waste Land. Precisely halfway between Gibraltar and Jerusalem
is Rome. We have thus three maps, one of a city, one of an
empire, one of a world. They are not set side by side; that is,
we do not make orderly progression from one map to the next
in the poem. Rather, it is as if they were layered, and we read
meaning from one map into another. Urban vision, imperial
vision, world vision: each illuminates the other.
The English Augustans, Mr. Kenner observes, saw
encouraging parallels between their London and Rome at
the time of Augustus. Eliot’s early plan for The Waste Land,
mentioned above, was to develop satiric parallels between
modern London and Augustan London. Mr. Kenner argues
persuasively that Eliot “may well have had in mind at one
time a kind of modern Aeneid, the hero crossing seas to pursue
his destiny, detained by one woman and prophesied to by
another, and encountering visions of the past and the future,
all culminated in a city both founded and yet to be founded,
unreal and oppressively real, the Rome through whose past
Dryden saw London’s future” (pp. 39–40). London was to be
“the original Fisher King as well as the original Waste Land,
resembling Augustine’s Carthage as Dryden’s London had
resembled Ovid’s Rome” (p. 28). With the final revisions,
however, the center of the poem became “the urban apocalypse,
the great City dissolved into a desert ...” (p. 46).
But I wonder whether the pre-eminent pattern for London
from first to last was not Rome. Of course, in one sense all the
cities in the final version of The Waste Land are the same: they
are Cities of Destruction. But the poem nonetheless focuses on
one particular city, London. Similarly, I think that the poem
focuses on one prototype for London, and that the prototype
is Rome, the center of the second map, and the center of the
western half of the third map. Among these three maps, studies
of The Waste Land have tended to concentrate on the first
and the third, Eliot’s urban vision and his world vision. But
London in 1922 was still the center of an empire. What I want

55
to concentrate on here is Eliot’s vision of imperial apocalypse
in The Waste Land, working from the hypothesis that a vision
of Rome and the Roman Empire lies behind Eliot’s vision of
London and the British Empire.
Rome could provide a pattern for London in The Waste
Land for good reason. The most obvious is that Rome was
once both a great city and the capital of a great empire. In
this, she is no different from those other great cities in Part V
that were also capitals of great though very different empires:
“Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, / Vienna, London.” This list
is worth examining. Eliot preserves the chronological order of
the flourishing of each empire. He lists three ancient empires
in one line, two modern ones in the following line. The large
gap between the three ancient and two modern empires is
dominated by Rome, who—and here she differs from the
other cities—held sway over all three old empires. The name
of Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, suggests a
line of succession, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire saw itself
as heir to the Holy Roman Empire, which in turn saw itself as
heir to the Roman Empire. Eliot was explicit about part of this
line of succession in 1951:
For Virgil’s conscious mind, it [destiny] means the
imperium romanum.... I think that he had few illusions
and that he saw clearly both sides of every question—the
case for the loser as well as the case for the winner.... And
do you really think that Virgil was mistaken? You must
remember that the Roman Empire was transformed into
the Holy Roman Empire. What Virgil proposed to his
contemporaries was the highest ideal even for an unholy
Roman Empire, for any merely temporal empire. We
are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still
citizens of the Roman Empire.... It remains an ideal, but
one which Virgil passed on to Christianity to develop and
to cherish.3
This is the older Eliot speaking. The younger Eliot was quite
detached about Christianity, but Eliot always saw himself as

56
heir to the riches of classical civilization, and especially Roman
civilization. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” appeared in
1919, and in 1923 Eliot wrote in the Criterion: “If everything
derived from Rome were withdrawn—everything we have from
Norman-French society, from the Church, from Humanism,
from every channel direct and indirect, what would be left? A
few Teutonic roots and husks. England is a ‘Latin’ country ...”
(Criterion, 2 [October 1923], 104).
“For at least seven years, it would seem,” writes Kenner,
“an urban apocalypse had haunted Eliot’s imagination” (p.
42). To an imagination thus haunted, and brooding from
1919 onward4 over material for what was to be The Waste
Land, it might very well have appeared that the inheritance
of Rome was disintegrating. “I am all for empires,” wrote
Eliot in January of 1924, “especially the Austro-Hungarian
Empire.”5 But the Austro-Hungarian Empire had just
been broken up by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. And
Christianity, considered simply as a force in history in the
way Henry Adams saw it, might also be disintegrating. “The
struggle of ‘liberal’ against ‘orthodox’ faith is out of date,”
Eliot wrote as early as 1916. “The present conflict is far
more momentous than that.”6 The ghost of Rome prevails
in The Waste Land because Rome evolved from the greatest
of Western empires into a Christian one; because the various
European empires that followed Rome, all the way down to
the British Empire, retained something of this inheritance,
including the association of church and state (at least,
officially); and because Eliot at the time of The Waste Land
sees the possibility that this inheritance and this association
will come to an end in the disintegration of church and state
and civilization as we know them. “Eliot ... once said to
me,” Spender recalls, “that The Waste Land could not have
been written at any moment except when it was written—a
remark which, while biographically true in regard to his own
life, is also true of the poem’s time in European history after
World War I. The sense that Western civilization was in a
state which was the realization of historic doom lasted from
1920 to 1926.”7

57
Notes
1. “The Urban Apocalypse,” in A. Walton Litz, ed., Eliot in His
Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land
(Princeton, 1973), pp. 23–49.
2. The Divine Comedy (Temple Classics edition), Paradiso, canto
xxvii, n. 11.
3. “Virgil and the Christian World,” broadcast from London,
Sept. 9, 1951; reprinted in T. S. Eliot: Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward
(London, 1953), p. 97.
4. And perhaps earlier. “I hope to get started on a poem I have in
mind” (Eliot to John Quinn, Nov. 5, 1919); he hopes “to write a long
poem I have had on my mind for a long time” (Eliot to his mother,
Dec. 18, 1919); in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the
Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie
Eliot (New York 1971), xviii.
5. Transatlantic Review, 1 (January 1924), 95.
6. International Journal of Ethics, 27 (1916), 117.
7. Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot (New York, 1975), pp. 117–18.
Louis Menand on Nineteenth Century Style
The composition of The Waste Land was a famously difficult
business. The story of Eliot’s troubles is now well enough
known to have become, for many readers, part of the experience
of the poem.1 Having been shoring fragments for a long work
since his first year in England, Eliot announced his intention
to begin putting his poem together in the fall of 1919, but
apparently found it almost impossible to proceed. “[E]very
evening, he went home to his flat hoping that he could start
writing again, and with every confidence that the material
was there and waiting,” he told Conrad Aiken, but “night
after night the hope proved illusory: the sharpened pencil lay
unused by the untouched sheet of paper. What could be the
matter? He didn’t know.”2 His writer’s block was aggravated
by circumstances: the demands of his job at Lloyds Bank, and
of the various freelance lecturing assignments he took on to
supplement his salary, left him with little energy for poetry; his
wife’s father became ill, then his wife, then Eliot himself; and a
visit from his mother and sister in the summer of 1921 seems to

58
have precipitated a crisis. He took three months’ leave from the
bank in October 1921, and went first to Margate for a month,
then to Lausanne to undergo therapy; and there, working in
solitude, he was able to complete a draft of the poem. Pound
performed his editorial role in January, and The Waste Land
seems finally to have been finished in the late spring or early
summer of 1922.
Eliot alludes often in his letters during this period to
personal troubles—to concern about the state of his marriage,
anxiety about his career, recurrent nervous exhaustion, even
the fear of mental illness—and it may be, as Ronald Bush has
suggested, that the combined traumatic weight of these worries
made writing poetry under ordinary conditions impossible
by compelling Eliot to confront emotional material that a
commitment to literary honesty made nearly intractable.3 And
there seems to have been a purely professional pressure on
Eliot as well, the pressure caused by the regular appearance on
his desk at The Egoist of the chapters of Ulysses in manuscript
from, which made him feel about his own work, as he explained
it to an interviewer many years later, that “[w]hat he was
tentatively attempting to do, with the usual false starts and
despairs, had already been done, done superbly and, it seemed
to him finally, in prose which without being poetic in the older
sense, had the intensity and texture of poetry.”4
But The Waste Land must have been difficult to write for
another, simpler reason. It was the promised major work of a
writer who, in his criticism, had exposed the delusiveness of
virtually every conventional prescription for poetical newness.
In a period when avant-garde literature seemed a function of
theories and manifestos, Eliot was an avant-gardist without
a program. Having demonstrated the factitiousness of the
traditional building blocks of poetic theory—the definition
of what literature is, the epistemological explanation of how
literature works, the notion that sincerity is a matter of being
true to oneself—Eliot must have found himself with nothing
to construct a poem on. Whatever their insight into the way
literature is perceived, his prescriptive essays are, from a
writer’s point of view, entirely impractical: the fourth of the

59
“Reflections on Contemporary Poetry” describes genuine
creativity as a business as unpremeditated as falling in love,
and “Tradition and the Individual Talent” assigns the poet
the whole of the Western tradition as homework but says
nothing about how that learning might, in the actual process of
composition, be put to use.
“[I]f we are to express ourselves, our variety of thoughts and
feelings, on a variety of subjects with inevitable rightness,” one
of the early essays counsels the modern poet, “we must adapt
our manner to the moment with infinite variations.”5 The
sentence might have been the model for many of Eliot’s early
critical prescriptions. It is a formula whose lack of metaphysical
content may be satisfying to the skeptic, but whose lack of
almost every other sort of content leaves the practitioner
somewhat worse off than he was without the advice, for it
provokes the question, What is one’s manner if it is a thing
infinitely adaptable? But let us suppose that this was a question
that Eliot, as he sat, a poem in his mind but a blank sheet
before him, asked himself at some point. It would not have
seemed unfamiliar to him, for it is a particular instance of the
general question posed by the extreme ontological relativism
of his dissertation: if each thing is entirely a function of its
perceived relation to every other thing, what sense does it make
for us to speak—as we do speak—of an object’s distinctive
character? Individuality—the set of qualities that “belong” to
the object—is, by the lights of the dissertation, a phantom;
it is an accident of the shape ordinary knowledge happens to
take, the inexplicable residue that remains after everything else
about a thing has been explained, or the unlikeness that is left
after all likenesses have been used up. The notion that there
are qualities original to the object persists because we have
made the decision to treat certain aspects of our experience
as discrete. But philosophically these discriminations have
no standing; they cannot survive analysis, whose virtue, the
dissertation reminds us, “is in showing the destructibility of
everything.”6
This might seem a problem whose working out will be of
interest only to metaphysicians and their antagonists; but it is

60
one of those apparently empty philosophical topics that take
on life in controversies in which the issues seem quite tangible
and the consequences are real enough. The question that Eliot
might, in some form or other, have asked himself—What is
“mine” about my poem?—is a version of this problem, and it
belongs to an important line of nineteenth-century thought.
The line is important because it was one of the ways the
nineteenth century undertook to defend the status of human
endeavor against the implications of scientific determinism,
and its consequences mattered because the way the question
is answered has an effect on the value that is attributed to art.
There is much in Eliot’s early writing that can be explained
by this nineteenth-century intellectual background; but it
is, characteristically, hard to know which side of the issue
Eliot wanted to come down on. For if “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” seems to lean toward one sort of answer to
the question, The Waste Land seems to lean in a rather different
direction. As is the case with many of the issues that figure in
modernist writing, the alternative ways of thinking about the
problem can be found articulated in particularly vivid forms in
the literature of the 1890s.
( ... )
Sitting at his desk with a blank sheet before him, Eliot
must thus have felt that in order to write a poem about the
experience of contemporary life, he would have to write a
poem that took in everything. And The Waste Land is indeed a
literary work that seems to regard the present moment—as it
is experienced by the individual subject—as a reinscription of
the whole of the cultural past, and the cultural past as though
it were the autobiography of a single consciousness. Or so, at
least, the notes to the poem suggest. “Tiresias,” explains the
note to line 218,
although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is
yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all
the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants,

61
melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not
wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all
the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in
Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the
poem.16
And the “one woman” of which all the women in the poem are
said to be types seems very like a version of Pater’s emblem
for the evolutionary history of consciousness summed up in
the expression of a single face, La Gioconda. Eliot’s symbol
of perpetual life appears first in the epigraph as the ancient
Sybil who cannot die, and again, perhaps, in “The Burial of
the Dead” as “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks” (“She is
older than the rocks among which she sits ...” runs Pater’s
description).17 She is the woman in “The Game of Chess,”
surrounded by “her strange synthetic perfumes” and on whose
dressing-room walls hang the “withered stumps of time”—the
artistic record of the mythical past (“... and all this has been to
her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the
delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments,
and tinged the eyelids and the hands”). And she appears, finally,
in “The Fire Sermon,” where she draws “her long black hair
out tight,” while
bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
(“... like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and
learned the secrets of the grave”).18
But The Waste Land makes a strange gloss on “Tradition
and the Individual Talent,” for it seems infected with a doubt
not addressed by the essay, but implicit in the intellectual
tradition to which the essay belongs. The doubt stems from
the assault the historicist thesis, in the name of subjectivity,
makes on the integrity of the individual subject: for after
everything in the poem that belongs to the tradition has been
subtracted, what sort of value can be claimed for what is left?

62
Pater called the remainder “style,” and he made it the signal—
in fact, the single—virtue of the literary object; but in Eliot’s
essay, all the emphasis is directed the other way. The writer
who, in obedience to “Tradition and the Individual Talent”’s
“programme for the métier of poetry,”19 undertakes to produce
the “really new” work of art, is given no place to look for its
origins; the program is distinctly inhospitable to such notions
as the Paterian “inner vision.” And the suspicion thus arises
that newness is nothing more than a kind of accident, a mistake
that could not, in the end, be avoided. The manner in which
The Waste Land dramatizes this doubt derives from the critique
of the historicist defense of culture, a critique to which Eliot
himself, in his brief career as a philosopher, made a relevant
contribution.
( ... )
All the difficulties with the late-nineteenth-century idea
of style seem to be summed up in The Waste Land. It is, to
begin with, a poem that includes an interpretation—and one
“probably not in accordance with the facts of its origin”—as
part of the poem, and it is therefore a poem that makes a
problem of its meaning precisely by virtue of its apparent
(and apparently inadequate) effort to explain itself. We cannot
understand the poem without knowing what it meant to its
author, but we must also assume that what the poem meant
to its author will not be its meaning. The notes to The Waste
Land are, by the logic of Eliot’s philosophical critique of
interpretation, simply another riddle—and not a separate
one—to be solved. They are, we might say, the poem’s way of
treating itself as a reflex, a “something not intended as a sign,”
a gesture whose full significance it is impossible, by virtue of
the nature of gestures, for the gesturer to explain.38
And the structure of the poem—a text followed by
an explanation—is a reproduction of a pattern that, as the
notes themselves emphasize, is repeated in miniature many
times inside the poem itself, where cultural expressions are
transformed, by the mechanics of allusion, into cultural

63
gestures. For each time a literary phrase or a cultural motif is
transposed into a new context—and the borrowed motifs in
The Waste Land are shown to have themselves been borrowed
by a succession of cultures39—it is reinterpreted, its previous
meaning becoming incorporated by distortion into a new
meaning suitable to a new use. So that the work of Frazer
and Weston is relevant both because it presents the history
of religion as a series of appropriations and reinscriptions
of cultural motifs, and because it is itself an unreliable
reinterpretation of the phenomena it attempts to describe.
The poem (as A. Walton Litz argued some time ago) is, in
other words, not about spiritual dryness so much as it is about
the ways in which spiritual dryness has been perceived.40 And
the relation of the notes to the poem proper seems further
emblematic of the relation of the work as a whole to the
cultural tradition it is a commentary on. The Waste Land is
presented as a contemporary reading of the Western tradition,
which (unlike the “ideal order” of “Tradition and the Individual
Talent”) is treated as a sequence of gestures whose original
meaning is unknown, but which every new text that is added to
it makes a bad guess at.
The author of the notes seems to class himself with the
cultural anthropologists whose work he cites. He reads the
poem as a coherent expression of the spiritual condition of the
social group in which it was produced. But the author of the
poem, we might say, does not enjoy this luxury of detachment.
He seems, in fact, determined to confound, even at the
cost of his own sense of coherence, the kind of interpretive
knowingness displayed by the author of the notes. The author
of the poem classes himself with the diseased characters of his
own work—the clairvoyante with a cold, the woman whose
nerves are bad, the king whose insanity may or may not be
feigned. He cannot distinguish what he intends to reveal about
himself from what he cannot help revealing: he would like to
believe that his poem is expressive of some general reality, but
he fears that it is only the symptom of a private disorder. For
when he looks to the culture around him, everything appears
only as a reflection of his own breakdown: characters and

64
objects metamorphose up and down the evolutionary scale;
races and religions lose their purity (“Bin gar keine Russin,
stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch”); an adulterated “To His Coy
Mistress” describes the tryst between Sweeney and Mrs. Porter,
and a fragmented Tempest frames the liaison of the typist and
the young man carbuncular; “London bridge is falling down.”
The poem itself, as a literary object, seems an imitation of this
vision of degeneration: nothing in it can be said to point to the
poet, since none of its stylistic features is continuous, and it has
no phrases or images that cannot be suspected of—where they
are not in fact identified as—belonging to someone else. The
Waste Land appears to be a poem designed to make trouble for
the conceptual mechanics not just of ordinary reading (for what
poem does not try to disrupt those mechanics?) but of literary
reading. For insofar as reading a piece of writing as literature is
understood to mean reading it for its style, Eliot’s poem eludes
a literary grasp.
But the composition of The Waste Land was not a reflex, of
course, and Eliot was not trying to produce a text determined
entirely by submission to outer circumstance and inner
compulsion; he was trying, I think, to write a poem that would
be “his own.” And for such an intention, “style,” as the late
nineteenth century conceived it, would have restricted what was
his in his poem precisely by drawing a line between what could
and could not be helped. For, as we have seen, in preserving
something in the work of art the artist can truly call his own,
Wilde and Pater handed over nearly everything to external
forces—to the given. But by renouncing as an illusion the very
value aestheticism had rescued from the flux, Eliot’s poem
seems to have won an even greater authority. For it was the
common argument of The Waste Land’s early champions—
Wilson (1922), Richards (1925), Leavis (1932)—that the poem
was held together not by its meaning, or by its author’s beliefs,
or by metaphysics, but by the unity of a single, coherent
authorial presence.41 If we want to account for this perception
of a work that appears so radically decentered—and to do so
by saying something more specific to the case than that The
Waste Land is a poem that takes advantage of the universal

65
habit of reading by which we infer an author for every text—we
might suggest that insofar as style had become a problematic
literary value, The Waste Land was a poem that succeeded by
presenting itself as a symptom. For the result of this strategy
is that since nothing in The Waste Land (except the notes, of
course, whose self-consciously “authorial” manner only makes
the symptomatic character of the rest appear more striking)
is more “Eliot’s” than anything else, everything in The Waste
Land is Eliot’s. Eliot appears nowhere, but his fingerprints are
on everything. And this gives him a victory over hermeneutics
as well, for there is no level of reading of Eliot’s poem at which
it is possible to say that we have reached a meaning that might
not have been put there by Eliot himself.
This view of The Waste Land belongs to the school that takes
the poem to be a work of “decreation,” as Frank Kermode
has called it, or a “roadway to nowhere,” in Eloise Knapp
Hay’s more recent phrase;42 it differs from the school that
takes the poem to be a signpost pointing toward “a further
stage in [Eliot’s] development,” or an account of “the trials of
a life in the process of becoming exemplary.”43 If the poem
was indeed intended as a kind of deliberate dead end, an
explosion of the nineteenth-century metaphysics of style
leaving nothing in its place, this ambition was perhaps one of
the things Eliot learned from Joyce. Ulysses, Eliot told Virginia
Woolf in a famous conversation, “destroyed the whole of the
19th century. It left Joyce with nothing to write another book
on. It showed up the futility of all the English styles.... [T]here
was no ‘great conception’: that was not Joyce’s intention....
Joyce did completely what he meant to do.”44 An essay Eliot
published in the Nouvelle Revue Française a few months after
this conversation gives us a better idea of the nature of the
accomplishment he had in mind: “The influence of [the style
of] Walter Pater,” he says there,
... culminates and disappears, I believe, in the work of
James Joyce.... In Ulysses this influence, like the influence
of Ibsen and every other influence to which Mr. Joyce
has submitted, is reduced to zero. It is my opinion that

66
Ulysses is not so distinctly a precursor of a new epoch
as it is a gigantic culmination of an old. In this book
Joyce has arrived at a very singular and perhaps unique
literary distinction: the distinction of having, not in a
negative but a very positive sense, no style at all. I mean
that every sentence Mr. Joyce writes is peculiarly and
absolutely his own; that his work is not a pastiche; but
that nevertheless, it has none of the marks by which a
“style” may be distinguished.
Mr. Joyce’s work puts an end to the tradition of Walter
Pater, as it puts an end to a great many other things....45
We are likely to feel that traditions are not so easily killed off
as the modernists supposed, that they live on long after their
metaphysics have been demolished. But this strange life of
the buried past is one of the things The Waste Land—and its
tradition—are all about.
Notes
1. The fullest biographical account of the writing of The Waste
Land is the one provided by Valerie Eliot in the introduction to her
edition of The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original
Drafts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. ix–xxix.
Lyndall Gordon provides a detailed study of the evolution of the
manuscript in Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), pp. 86–109, 143–46.
2. Conrad Aiken, “An Anatomy of Melancholy,” in T. S. Eliot: The
Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 195.
3. See Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 67–72.
4. Anthony Cronin, “A Conversation with T. S. Eliot About the
Connection Between Ulysses and The Waste Land,” The Irish Times, 16
June 1971, p. 10. The conversation took place in the late 1950s.
5. “Whether Rostand Had Something About Him,” The
Athenaeum, 25 July 1919, p. 665. Eliot was commenting on his sense
that the effort to avoid rhetoric had become a rhetoric itself.
6. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley
(London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 157. Eliot’s dissertation is
discussed herein in chapter two.
16. Quotations from The Waste Land are from the Boni and
Liveright edition (1922), reprinted at the end of The Waste Land: A
Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot.

67
17. Grover Smith makes this identification in “T. S. Eliot’s Lady
of the Rocks,” Notes and Queries, 194 (19 March 1949), 123–25.
“The Madonna of the Rocks” is the title given to another Leonardo
portrait.
18. Pater, p. 99. Crawling down a wall head first is a habit of
vampires, one exhibited by the hero of Bram Stoker’s popular Dracula
(1897). In an earlier version of this passage in The Waste Land, the
woman gives way first to a vampire, then to a man who wishes not to
be reborn, and finally to something like the “diver in deep seas” of
Pater’s description (see The Waste Land facsimile, pp. 113–15).
19. The Sacred Wood, p. 52.
38. It is part of the tradition of Waste Land hermeneutics to
regard the notes as more or less incidental to the poem proper, and
therefore as bits of text that can be treated selectively—some notes
may be considered more applicable than others, at the discretion of
the commentator—and at face value, as meaning what they say in a
way the rest of the poem is assumed not to. (Thus, for instance, the
poem has been reprinted in various anthologies, including The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, with editorial annotations of some lines
interspersed among Eliot’s own notes.) It is true, of course, that The
Waste Land was first published without the notes, which Eliot added
for the book edition; but they appeared together in every subsequent
reprinting. The relevance of Eliot’s graduate paper on interpretation
alone, not to mention the larger intellectual background I have
sketched in, seems enough to justify an approach that considers the
notes as part of the poem; but even if Eliot did intend the notes to
be straightforward elucidations of the meaning, or some part of the
meaning, of his poem, on what hermeneutical grounds can they be
considered differently from the rest of the text?
It might be noted that when Arnold Bennett asked Eliot, in 1924,
whether the notes to The Waste Land were “a skit,” Eliot answered
that “they were serious, and not more of a skit than some things in
the poem itselfâ†œ” (The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower
[London: Cassell, 1933], III, 52; entry for 10 September 1924). For
Eliot’s own comments on the circumstances of publication that led to
the production of the notes, see “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956),
in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957),
pp. 121–22. It is natural (on my view of the poem) that Eliot should
generally have disparaged the explanatory (as opposed to the literary)
significance of the notes—they are, in any case, fairly self-disparaging
as they stand—since their interpretive inadequacy is precisely their
point.
39. The conflation, for instance, of the iconography of the Tarot
pack, the symbolic figures of Frazer’s vegetation rites, and the
mythology of Christianity (highlighted by the note to line 46).

68
40. See A. Walton Litz, “The Waste Land Fifty Years After,” in Eliot
in His Time, ed. Litz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 7.
41. See Edmund Wilson, Jr., “The Poetry of Drouth,” The Dial,
73 (December 1922), 611–16 (“the very images and the sound of
the words—even when we do not know precisely why he has chosen
them—are charged with a strange poignancy which seems to bring
us into the heart of the singer” [p. 616]); I. A. Richards, Principles of
Literary Criticism, 2d ed. (1925; rpt. New York and London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, n.d.), pp. 289–95 (“the poem still remains to be
read.... But that is not difficult to those who still know how to give
their feelings precedence to their thoughts, who can accept and unify
an experience without trying to catch it in an intellectual net or to
squeeze out a doctrine.... The ideas [in Eliot’s poetry] ... combine into
a coherent whole of feeling and attitude” [pp. 292–3]); F. R. Leavis,
New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932),
pp. 90–113 (“the unity of The Waste Land is no more ‘metaphysical’
than it is narrative or dramatic.... The unity the poem aims at is that
of an inclusive consciousness” [p. 103]).
42. See Frank Kermode, “A Babylonish Dialect,” in T. S. Eliot: The
Man and His Work, ed. Tate, p. 240; and Eloise Knapp Hay, T. S. Eliot’s
Negative Way (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University
Press, 1982), p. 48.
43. See A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 79; and Gordon, Eliot’s Early
Years, p. 110.
44. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier
Bell, II (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978),
203. Entry for 26 September 1922.
45. “Contemporary English Prose,” Vanity Fair, 20 (July 1923),
51. First published, in French, in Nouvelle Revue Française, 19 (1
December 1922), pp. 751–56; it was solicited for Vanity Fair by the
magazine’s young managing editor, Edmund Wilson (see Wilson,
Letters on Literature and Politics 1912–1972, ed. Elena Wilson [New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977], p. 103).
Sandra M. Gilbert on
Eliot’s Mourning of a Friend
That The Waste Land is not only elegiac in manner but more
strictly in mode has already been argued by quite a few critics,
including James Miller, Gregory Jay, and myself. In 1977, for
instance, Miller offered a particularly interesting analysis of the

69
efforts at elegiac resolution embodied in “What the Thunder
Said,” while in 1983 Jay noted that the “corpus of the elegy
lies buried in The Waste Land.” Jay’s reading was primarily
Bloomian, with hardly any reference to the work’s biographical
context, but Miller’s discussion, evolving out of his brilliant and
still underappreciated T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, drew
on John Peter’s 1952 hypothesis that the poem’s central but
repressed theme is its author’s grief for a beloved male friend
whom we now know to have been the young French medical
student Jean Verdenal, killed in action at Gallipoli on May 2,
1915. 26 And by now, too, most Eliot scholars would concede
that the death of Verdenal inspired in the writer of The Waste
Land a personal and poetic crisis. Understanding the young
Frenchman to have been “(so far as I could find out) ... mixed
with the mud of Gallipoli,” the poet himself plunged into the
muck of a “rats’ alley” where “the dead men lost their bones,”
and a waste land at whose center his dead friend is buried.27
Read as a dirge for Verdenal, therefore, The Waste Land
becomes a kind of fragmented pastoral (or, more accurately,
antipastoral) elegy, a work that both continues and, in response
to severe personal and cultural shock, disrupts the tradition of
a man mourning for a man that extends from Moschus [Greek
pastoral poet, c. 150 b.c.] and Bion [the subject of a dirge
believed to have been written by Moschus] to [Walt] Whitman
and is also radically mutilated in Owen’s “Strange Meeting”
[an elegy a soldier writes for the man he killed, whom he meets
in death with a tenderness he did not know when his enemy
was alive]. Indeed, read in this way, Eliot’s Waste Land may be
considered a figure for No Man’s Land itself, a ravaged terrain
littered with the shards of the English elegy. Here, haunted not
so much by the ghost as by the literal body of a dead comrade
(“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) whose blutbruderschaft
had in a sense guaranteed his own identity, Eliot/Tiresias
becomes himself an impassioned witness to the woes of a world
shattered by (and for) the war’s shattered armies of the night.
At the same time, because he is a mourner driven by precisely
the need for consolation that impels the speakers of traditional
elegies like those whose lineaments his poem explodes, the

70
Waste Land speaker deploys (albeit with considerable savagery)
many conventional features of the pastoral elegy: the ironic
discrepancy between nature’s endurance as manifested in the
returning spring and his own sense of mortal loss (“April is
the cruelest month”); a consciousness that he speaks for, even
while he is somehow set apart from, a community of mourners
(“crowds of people walking round in a ring”); a feeling that
the world which has survived his friend is itself debilitated by
loss (“I had not thought death had undone so many”); a vision
of the dead man journeying deeper into death (“He passed
the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool”);
a warning that such a fate is universal (“Consider Phlebas,
who was once handsome and tall as you”); and an effort to
confound death either by imagining resurrection (“a damp
gust / Bringing rain”) or by redefining the terror of mortality
(“Shantih Shantih Shantih”).28
But because Eliot has lost his friend to an unprecedentedly
calamitous war and finds himself in a postwar deathscape
where, as Freud put it, the “all-embracing patrimony [of
Western culture is] disintegrated,” he has only fragments of
the pastoral elegy to shore against his ruin. Thus the muses,
nymphs, envoys of nature, and spectral visitors who appear in
most elegies to guide the sufferer toward consolation are here
even more deformed than the dead double Owen encounters
in the dull tunnel of his elegy. Lycidas’s “sisters of the sacred
well” and Adonais’s (or In Memoriam’s) Urania become the
parodic Madame Sosostris, the sinister Belladonna, and the
vulgar Lil; Milton’s and Shelley’s nymphs (and In Memoriam’s
radiant bride) metamorphose into the nymphs who have “now
departed” with or without “the loitering heirs of city directors,”
into the bored typist, into the betrayed Thames daughters, and
perhaps most horrifyingly, into the intransigently common
“Mrs. Porter and her daughter,” antiheroines of a bawdy ballad
sung by Australian troops at Gallipoli, where Verdenal died;
Whitman’s bird victoriously singing “death’s outlet song”
becomes not just the hallucinatory “water-dripping” hermit
thrush but also the raped nightingale who only says “jug jug”
to “dirty ears”; and Whitman’s comforting “Dark mother

71
always gliding near with soft feet” dissolves into a disembodied
“Murmur of maternal lamentation” or a ghastly woman, clearly
figuring death, who draws “her long black hair out tight.”
( ... )
But if The Waste Land responds to the trauma of the war by
fragmenting the pastoral elegy, it also retains within the text
significant traces of what we might consider the deadly shell
that shocked its author. Although the poem is usually seen
as marked by the war in only the general way in which most
postwar art was affected by a pervasive cultural disillusionment,
Eliot’s ostensibly “impersonal” document is specifically
imprinted with wistful memories of Verdenal, with haunting
references to Gallipoli, and with horrified allusions to the
details of the battlefield, whose most gruesome particularities
had been widely reported by the time the author began to write
his poem. To be sure, as is the case with any great work, the
imagery of The Waste Land is overdetermined, but even just a
quick look at the text yields striking specifics.
Verdenal: it was the “cruel month” of April in which the
poet’s friendship with this simpatico young Frenchman, a lover
of Wagner and Laforgue, seems to have truly flowered, as is
evident from a letter of Eliot’s to a cousin, from Verdenal’s
letters to Eliot, and from Eliot’s single published reference to
his Paris ami, apart from the dedications of early volumes. In
a jubilant letter of 26 April 1911, Eliot wrote that “Paris has
burst out ... into full spring: and it is such a revelation that I
feel that I ought to make it known,” adding that “M. Verdenal
was in the garden and ... I threw a lump of sugar at him.” 30
On April 22, 1912, a year later, Verdenal wrote Eliot in
Cambridge to tell him that “Vous me fûtes particulierement
évoqué par le contact de ce paysage senti ensemble”: that Eliot
was particularly evoked for him by the verdant landscape that
they had admired, appreciated, felt together (“senti ensemble”).
And in a previous letter, he quoted a passage from Gide’s
Paludes (1895) filled with yearning to return to “that place I
know, where in darkened ... water, the leaves of bygone years are

72
still steeping and softening—the leaves of adorable springtimes”
(L 32; emphasis mine).
Finally, decades later, in April 1934, Eliot wrote in The
Criterion, in a rare personal moment, about his own poignant
memory of “a sentimental sunset [and] a friend coming across
the Luxembourg gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch
of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be
mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.” 31
( ... )
And it was on this historically resonant yet ultimately
“savage” and “desolate” peninsula, this “arid rocky” finger of
Europe reaching toward Asia, that Verdenal was cited for his
heroism on April 30, 1915, when “scarcely recovered from
pleurisy [he] did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the
water up to his waist helping to evacuate the wounded by sea”
(TS 21). And it was in this liminal place between land and sea,
rock and shadow, that the young French doctor was killed in
action, again tending the wounded, two days later.
Details of his death, and of the battlefield on which he died,
may have at first been difficult to obtain, but as Eliot admitted
in his comment in the Criterion, the poet sought to find out
as much as he could. Much of what he understood to have
happened was surely gleaned from information that gradually
emerged about combat conditions. He would surely have read
Masefield’s book—a narrative by a literary colleague, after all—
and he would have learned from other accounts, too. Learned,
for instance, that on the Gallipoli peninsula the “labyrinths
of trenches” had sardonic names like “Dublin Castle, Half
Moon Street” or (I would add) “rats’ alley” (FT 193). That
the Anzacs sang bawdily about Mrs. Porter and her daughter.
That the dead men lost their bones because they so often went
unburied. That queer sardonic rats were everywhere. That
the jolly old rain gave no relief. And later, long after the war,
that on the Gallipoli peninsula and elsewhere the (re)“Burial
of the Dead,” those never properly buried and those only (as
it were) temporarily buried, became a significant issue, with,

73
as Jay Winter reminds us, in the early ‘twenties hundreds of
thousands of dead soldiers being dug up (like the corpse in
The Waste Land) and posthumously “demobbed”—that is, sent
home for reburial (SM 22–30).
Notes
26. In what has since become a classic of literary censorship, the
poet’s solicitors had Peter’s original essay suppressed, but Peter’s
argument is still much the most incisive statement of what might
be considered the text’s covert “plot,” for whether or not one would
choose to claim that the speaker of The Waste Land had “fallen
completely,” even “irretrievably,” in love, it is clear that an “object of
his love was a young man.” See John Peter, “A New Interpretation
of the Waste Land,” in Essays in Criticism, 2 (1952), 242–66; also
James Miller, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons
(University Park, Pa., 1977), hereafter cited in text as TS; and also
Gregory Jay, T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Baton Rouge,
La., 1983), pp. 156–62. My own earlier discussion of The Waste Land
as fragmented elegy appears in Sexchanges, pp. 310–14.
27. Eliot’s comment about Verdenal was made in a review of Henri
Massis, Evocations, that appeared in the Criterion, April 1934; the poet
remembered “a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the
late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far
as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli”; for further
commentary see Miller, Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, p, 19 and passim.
For other analyses of the relationship see George Watson, “Quest
for a Frenchman,” The Sewanee Review, 84 (1976), 465–75, and John
T. Mayer, T. S. Eliot’s Silent Voices (New York, 1989), pp. 199–202.
Without entering into details about what some commentators have
scathingly called “the homosexual interpretation of The Waste Land,”
I must confess that I myself have long thought the argument about
Verdenal’s significance to Eliot is incontrovertible. It was to “Jean
Verdenal/1889–1915,” after all (as Miller and others have reminded
us), that the 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations, the 1920 Ara
Vos Prec, and the 1925 Poems: 1909–1925 were dedicated, with the
addition in 1925 of the identifying tag mort aux Dardanelles and the
telling epigraph from Canto 21 of The Purgatorio that declares “Now
you are able to comprehend the quantity of love that warms me
toward you, / When I forget our emptiness / Treating shades as if they
were solid.” And it seems almost certain that it was of Verdenal as well
as of his own unhappy marriage that Eliot was thinking when he so
famously remarked that his ostensibly impersonal cultural document
was really only the product of “a personal ... grouse against life.”

74
28. A number of the points I make here and in the next few
paragraphs are drawn from Sexchanges .
30. T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1 1898–1922, ed.
Valerie Eliot (New York, 1988), p. 18; hereafter cited in text as L.
31. See n. 27 above.
Michael Levenson on
Eliot’s Views of Postwar London
When Eliot settled in London, he moved steadily into an
infatuation with his new home. “I like London better than
before”—“I like London very well”—“I have been to a cubist
tea”—“I want to live in London”—“I love to be in London”
(LOTSE, 55, 57, 77, 107, 122). Still, within the chanting,
crooning enthusiasm, he remained acutely conscious of the
strains on a foreigner. It’s no surprise that his affection for the
city grew in proportion to the successful spinning of a social
web. He repeatedly counts the number of friends in those
early months; he needs those friends because, as he later put it,
“getting recognized in English letters is like breaking open a
safe—for an American” (LOTSE, 392).
By 1919 Eliot can boast that he has “more influence on English
letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry
James. I know a great many people, but there are many more
who would like to know me ...” The possibility of returning to
the United States lingers: Charles W. Eliot, the ex-President of
Harvard, asks how his kinsman “can forego the privilege of living
in the genuine American atmosphere—a bright atmosphere of
freedom and hope” (LOTSE, 323). But whatever the attractions
of freedom, London has the allure of power: “if one is to do
anything in literature this is the best place to be,” and this
because “London imposes her acceptance of a man’s work on
all the English speaking world and ... accepts no other standard
than her own” (LOTSE, 107, 102). On this point Eliot is clear,
convinced, and self-delighted: London is the imperial capital of
culture, and to break open its safe is to uncover riches that can
be redeemed in any literary market.

75
The “safe” is, of course, a resonant figure of speech for a
young banker, resonant but not surprising, because we certainly
misread both Eliot’s modernity and his urbanity if we ignore
his role as a practitioner of economics, working amid various
subtle currencies.3 What appears in one guise as the question
of war reparations, shows itself in another as a problem in the
economies of literary reputation. From the start of his London
life he understands and accepts the material conditions of
success, the economy of reputation. It is essential, he concludes,
that a writer “should establish solid connections with at least
one important paper” (LOTSE, 358)—and there follows the
coldly unsentimental insight:
There are only two ways in which a writer can become
important—to write a great deal, and have his writings appear
everywhere, or to write very little ... I write very little, and I
should not become more powerful by increasing my output.
My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of
verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a
year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect
in their kind, so that each should be an event. (LOTSE, 358)
This is a canny exercise in what might fairly be called cynical
literary reason.4 It suggests that Eliot’s banker’s understanding
of writing markets led him to administer his reputation
carefully within a robustly modernized urban culture.5 He will
write that he is intent to keep his book of criticism short: “I
want it small,” he writes, “in order to make it a single distinct
blow” (LOTSE, 355). In choosing to follow the little way, the
terse way, Eliot acknowledges the power of cultural mystery,
of the reticent perfectionist, who locks the safe he has broken
open, and who, to change figures, creates hunger by feeding
the public so sparingly. At the same time he opens a connection
between the conditions of reputation and the forms of literary
experiment practiced in those early London years. The
suppression of a narrative continuity that was still flickering
in “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” the burnishing of
smaller fragments, the violent shift in attention between verse
paragraphs, the movement to the greater difficulty of the
quatrain poems, “Gerontion,” and climactically The Waste

76
Land—all this occurs within the complex cultural universe that
Eliot seeks to command through the economic resources of
the “single distinct blow,” whether it take the form of a short
critical book or a self-standing poetic conceit: “A woman drew
her long black hair out tight.” 6
Through the grimness of the war years, Eliot sought and
quickly felt the mastery of the imperial literary summit. In
the spring of 1919 he writes, “I am getting to know and be
known by all the intelligent or important people in letters”
(LOTSE, 285). And yet through the course of that year Eliot
felt a sudden dissolution of the carefully prepared edifice of
mastery. The wartime metropolis had been a depleted city,
where literary activity had been reduced to a low simmer.
Even as some modernists fought and died—T. E. Hulme and
Gaudier-Brzeska among them—those who stayed home in
London had found an urban culture small and pliable enough
to yield to literary activism. Surely it’s telling that the great
moment of crisis in Eliot’s work coincides with the recovery of
peace. The postwar metropolis became the saturated city again,
but for Eliot the vigorous city was a new difficulty. “London
has never been so full,” writes Vivien Eliot, “the crowds are so
enormous, everywhere, in the streets and public places, theatres
restaurants ... one sees Americans at every turn” (LOTSE, 265).
Written so soon after the carnage of the war, the poem
has naturally been understood as an engagement with the
civilization of violence. But a burden of this argument is that
The Waste Land needs to be located within the immediate
surround of the postwar city, the city cursed not by military
violence, but by hectic peace. It’s the city of the dead, as we
have always known, but these are peculiar corpses: they twitch
so spasmodically. Eliot’s London letters for The Dial and his
private correspondence describe “the putrescence of English
literature” (LOTSE, 431), but the accumulating picture is one
of a seething putrescence, a frantic routine. The drafts of “The
Fire Sermon” are searing.
London, the swarming life you kill and breed,
Huddled between the concrete and the sky;

77
London, your people is bound upon the wheel!
Phantasmal gnomes, burrowing in brick and stone and steel!
(TWL, 31, 106–7, 112–13).
It’s the roiling capital of peace that consumes Eliot, the boom
town that haunts him as the war never did: the noisy, swarming
town, not conscious enough to know that it’s dead. The urban
destruction in The Waste Land—London Bridge falling down,
the collapsing towers of the European capitals—takes on a
peculiar valence: a tone of perceptible relief that lives within
the catastrophe.7 What the poem both dreads and desires is
the annihilation of the city as apparatus, what Eliot calls “the
postwar machinery of life” with its “horrible waste,” the city as
the relentless wheel (LOTSE, 410).
2.
John Maynard Keynes published The Economic Consequences
of the Peace in 1919 as a bitter polemic against the Peace
Treaty agreed at the Paris conference. Having attended the
conference as an official of the British Treasury, Keynes was
witness to the working of power at its most lofty summit. What
he saw was the fatal emptiness of the grand Parisian bargain.
Gazing at the faces of the world’s great leaders, of Wilson and
Clemenceau, he came to doubt whether they “were really faces
at all and not the tragi-comic masks of some strange drama or
puppet-show.”8 “The nerve center of the European system”
was haunted by “dreadful specters.”
“Paris was a nightmare and everyone there was morbid.
A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous
scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events
confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of
the decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from
without ... ” (ECP, 5)
More than Jessie Weston, more than The Golden Bough,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace anticipates the ghostly
modality of The Waste Land, the spectral insight into the
fictions of modernity. Keynes’s Paris is the unreal city of peace:

78
there are no living people there, only the heavy masks of
insubstantial men, flapping the artificial wings of leadership.
Since the work of Eleanor Cook we’ve had reason to ponder
the connection between Eliot and Keynes, and reason to
connect Keynes’ book to Eliot’s labor at Lloyds Bank, where
he described himself as “dealing alone with all the debts and
claims of the bank under the various Peace Treaties” (LOTSE,
451).9 But The Economic Consequences of the Peace must be read as
more than a textual impetus to the writing of The Waste Land; it
must be seen as a canny instrument for stitching the relations
of politics, economics and poetry at an uncanny juncture.
Power absconditus—that is the savage Keynesian insight: those
who have been entrusted with the world’s fate have withdrawn
into the fantasy of an untenable peace. It is all like Tolstoy, shrieks
Keynes, it’s like Hardy’s The Dynasts, this spectacle of “events
marching on to their fated conclusion uninfluenced and unaffected
by the cerebrations of Statesmen in Council” (ECP, 6).
Here is the first cold perception that we need to bring to
the politics of The Waste Land, exactly the perception of power
absconditus. There was an Archduke who once took Marie out
on a sled. There was a Coriolanus, now broken. There were
loitering heirs of city directors, now departed, having left no
addresses. There was a Fisher King. All these powers have
receded, creating a landscape in which fearful selves are left
to wander, at the mercy of forces no longer governed by once
formidable authorities, Kings and Generals, Directors and
Dukes.
And yet when big power absconds, it leaves little power
behind. Such is its genius.10 The epigraph from Heart of
Darkness, discarded in the late stages of revision, belongs to
this pattern of abandonment. Kurtz is yet another recent leader
whose recession will abandon events to their own blind course.
And yet we know that the agony of Kurtz’s retrospection—his
horror, his horror—is both a crisis in social power and a crisis
of subjectivity. No doubt the allure of Conrad’s Kurtz for Eliot,
as an exemplary, epigraphic figure, depended on the productive
confusion of realms: personal agony indistinguishable from
political catastrophe.

79
The Waste Land, with all its toppled towers of authority,
displays power persisting. It persists in the opportunities
within the zone of personal intimacy, in the micro-power
of intersubjectivity. The barbarous king who rudely forced
Philomela is the terrible figure for the politics of intimacy,
power between bodies, whose effects are written throughout
the poem. Eliot envisions the local dyad, two flailing, flirting
subjects, as a little system of submission and hierarchy,
obedience and control. As the glimpsed idyll in the poem’s final
movements puts it, “your heart would have responded/ Gaily,
when invited, beating obedient/ To controlling hands” (TWL,
146, 420–22). Give, sympathize, and control—these are the
overcharged imperatives of regulated subjectivity.
“It is terrible to be alone with another person,”—so Eliot
had written (in “The Death of the Duchess,” TWL, 105, 25),
and the ferocity of this insight is everywhere abrasive in The
Waste Land. Two people make their own politics. Whether
they give or control, either in silence or in howling eroticism,
the mere human pair are already expert in the administration
of power. “What is to be done?” demanded Lenin. In the
drawing-room politics of The Waste Land this becomes, “What
shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?” (TWL, 138,
133–34) All through the poem runs the appalling compound
of bottomless demand (“Stay with me,” “Speak to me,” 138,
111–12) and endless refusal (“I can’t bear to look at you,” 146).
This is what Beckett will exploit and exhaust: this scene of two
creatures alone, begging, clutching, biting, tickling, loving,
loathing, without even the solace of a frame around the misery.
What the micro-politics of intimacy lacks is a world to
inhabit, a society stretching out around the desperate dyad,
a political context within which helpless subjectivity might
orient itself. In a universe where “each man fixed his eyes
before his feet” (TWL, 136, 65), even the intelligibility of
space disappears. You trace the steps of the one in front of you,
or you find yourself in a closed car; you follow the current
of the city streets, or you drift with the river; but you never
assemble a coherent or stable milieu that might be called an
“outer world.” These grammatical subjects can finally do little

80
more than testify to their victimage: “I read much of the night”
(TWL, 135, 18); “After the event/ He wept” (143, 297–98); “I
can connect/ Nothing with nothing” (143, 301–2).
And how could she? How could she connect her suffering to
the political incoherence of The Waste Land moment—of 1921,
that year of “incessant strain and stress”, a year of starvation in
Russia, of Irish militancy, of unprecedented unemployment,
of a coal strike in Britain from April to June described as “the
greatest dispute and cessation of work ever recorded in any
country.”11 For figures in The Waste Land the legitimacy of
government is only a memory, not a frame or a background or
a confirming world picture.12
3.
The disappearance of the background of conviction, the
dissolution of a world-picture—Keynes is at his most searching
when he describes their loss. We never noticed, he writes, that
what we took as natural and permanent, namely, the political
life of the West in the fifty years before the war, was in fact
“intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, [and]
temporary.” The end of the war has exposed the truth: that
what Europe understood as the order of things was a recent
contrivance whose collapse leaves us on a “sandy and false
foundation” (ECP, 3). The great rise of European capital
depended on naturalizing an artifice as something “normal,
certain, and permanent” (ECP, 12). But now Europe must live
with the dissolution of the norm, the decay of the natural.
What happens then to politics when its “nature” can no
longer mystify, when the great statesmen stand revealed as
puppets, when potent events overwhelm paltry agents, and
when paltry agents are left to exercise power on their own?
The answer for Keynes, and no less for Eliot, is that politics
devolves into an economics, where economics is the name
for the play of interests and desires when they are no longer
veiled (or constrained) by the theatrics of political deception.
The system of Europe had depended on the “double bluff,” by
which the great capitalists agreed to invest, not to consume,

81
and workers were persuaded that they somehow had a stake in
the wealth of others. After the war the bluff has been exposed;
politics descends into the unsentimental truths of economics,
the truth of the power in material interests.
In its crowds on the bridge, in its hooded hordes, The Waste
Land tersely acknowledges the class basis of the disenchanted
postwar world, but just as the London crowd resolves into
Stetson, so the poem makes its sharp turn toward individuals,
and public concerns gather around personal pronouns: my
ruins, my lands. But in this Waste Land to remain alone is
exactly not to escape the politico/economic crisis of those first
postwar years, the crisis Keynes identified with the insight
of Lenin, who thought that “the best way to destroy the
Capitalist system was to debauch [its] currency.” A “debauch”
is just what the Times called it, this period of startling inflation
built on the quicksand of rising prices. The cost of living
rose month by month, climbing to a peak at the end of 1920,
and the difficulty wasn’t scarcity of goods: the problem was
“scandalous profiteering,” middlemen with ample supplies
unwilling to bring prices down, intent to enjoy, for as long
as they could, the artificial boom.13 The government was
seen as helpless—bands of shoppers, hoodless hordes, took
matters into their own hands, organizing boycotts against the
profiteers. When the Eliots looked for a new flat in 1920, they
found that the “fantastic” rents were running “from two to four
times what we pay now” (LOTSE, 406, 390). The sagging poet
complained to his mother that though his salary had risen to
500 pounds, “which would have seemed a fortune ... four years
ago” (LOTSE, 353), now it is worth scarcely more than 250
pounds.
The notorious young man carbuncular in The Waste Land
is, notably, a small house agent’s clerk, who (the drafts explain)
“flits” from “flat to flat” with clients like the Eliots (TWL, 45,
157–58). He is a case worker in the inflationary epidemic—a
middleman within the system of profiteering. If he has a bold
stare like a Bradford millionaire, that is because in the city of
flowing money, numbers now change their meaning. As Keynes
caustically put it, “Where we spent millions before the war, we

82
have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions and
apparently not suffer for it” (ECP, 4).
As for the clerk’s metropolitan bride, the typist home at
teatime, she has already led a semi-lustrous life in Eliot’s
correspondence, where in describing the world of Lloyds Bank,
he had written, “I have half of a room, two girls, and half of a
typist” (LOTSE, 232), and then goes on to explain the problem
with typists. The trouble is that some of them “don’t have to
work:” they just “want something to do” (LOTSE, 204). In
The Waste Land, of course, this turns into the something-to-do
of sexuality. The end of the war brought the arrival of single
women in public places, on the bus and in the squares. Peter
Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway returns to London from India and
swoons before the women on the street: “even the poorest
dressed better than five years ago surely; and to his eye the
fashions had never been so becoming; the long black cloaks; the
slimness, the elegance, and then the delicious and apparently
universal habit of paint ... this taking out a stick of rouge or
a powder-puff, and making up in public.”14 Eliot himself
has known the subterranean tie between London and libido.
Several years earlier he had described “one of those nervous
sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city ... One
walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement
rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches” (LOTSE,
75). But it’s in the period of the twenties that the sexual
heightening becomes conspicuous and inescapable; it appears
as its own form of inflation, product of and counterpart to the
inflation in prices, incomes and rents; and it appears up and
down the social ladder.

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. (TWL, 138–39, 148–50)
And, there is. That is the economic insight, the insight into a
fevered economy, a sexual economy where there is more money
chasing more bodies; in an apt Keynesian aphorism: “the war
has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the

83
vanity of abstinence to many” (ECP, 22). Or: “Others can pick
and choose if you can’t” (TWL, 139, 154).
Costing more and offering less, sex and commerce entwine
in the city of raging peace. When the clerk and the typist
clutch, fidget, and discharge, they perform their desires at the
intersection point of this double coercion: money and libido.
Mr. Eugenides may be unshaven but his traffic in currants
yields enough cash for a lurid weekend. Those heirs to banking
directorships may not yet have come into their plush offices on
Threadneedle Street, but their silk handkerchiefs and cigarettes
can still beguile the nymphs on the upper Thames. Such figures
are the postwar successors to Fisher Kings and Archdukes,
dispersed modern powers who can ride the crest of easy money.
When “Death by Water” records the forgetting of the “profit
and loss,” it not only suggests a transfiguring death, it enacts
the poem’s own disengagement with bad currencies.
Notes
3. Lawrence Rainey has given the decisive account of the economic
life of early modernism. See his richly detailed narrative of the
negotiations leading to the publication of The Waste Land. “The
Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land,” in T. S. Eliot:
The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 91–133.
4. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael
Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
5. Leonard Diepeveen discusses Eliot’s management of his
reputation through the active construction of an audience responsive
to his forms of difficulty. Diepeveen reconstructs Eliot’s tactic of
creating “a small, qualified audience of good readers for modern
writing. They form part of a small group who are willing to undergo
the hard work and training required for reading modern writing,
which is difficult, but necessarily so. The purpose of this narrowing
down is not first of all to exclude readers (although it certainly does
do that), for the maligned audience is not present. Rather, it is to
encourage a small group of readers in a tendency that was encouraged
by the sorts of magazines they read: to imagine themselves as part of
a professional elite, as included in the appreciators of good writing,
writing that looks remarkably like The Waste Land.” “â†œ‘I Can Have
More Than Enough Power to Satisfy Me:’ T. S. Eliot’s Construction
of His Audience,” Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization,

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Rereading, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 52.
6. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of
the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1971), 145, ln 377. Hereafter the work is abbreviated in
the text as TWL followed by page and line number.
7. In Kenner’s well-known argument, the evolution of the poem
runs from the city of Dryden in the early drafts to the catastrophic
anti-metropolitan tableau of “What the Thunder Said.” The “center
had become the urban apocalypse, the great City dissolved into a
desert where voices sang from exhausted wells ...” Hugh Kenner, “The
Urban Apocalypse,” Eliot in His Time, ed. A. Walton Litz (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973), 46.
8. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(New York: Harcourt, Brace Howe, 1920); hereafter abbreviated in
the text as ECP.
9. Eleanor Cook notes of Keynes’s book that it is “contemporary
with the poem; its sheds light on some of the allusions in The Waste
Land, ties the poem to post-World-War-I history, and incidentally
relates Eliot’s work at Lloyds Bank to his poetry.” She further observes
that “the phrasing in The Economic Consequences of the Peace evokes an
apocalyptic foreboding, and sense of nightmare very like that in
The Waste Land.” “T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace,” ELH 46
(1979): 347–48.
10. Here, of course, see Foucault on the filiations and imbrications
of Power. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979).
11. Times, 31 December 1921, 6.
12. The disorienting political geography of Eliot’s postwar world
is captured well by Cook, who unfolds the suggestions within the
analogy between London after World War I and Rome after the
Punic Wars. She invokes Augustine’s gloomy account of Roman
decadence: “after the destruction of Carthage there came the highest
pitch of discord, greed, ambition, and all the evils which generally
spring up in times of prosperity” (“T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian
Peace,” 350). David Roessel locates Mr. Eugenides within the
context of the postwar struggle between Turkey and Greece over
the national identity of Smyrna, noting that “Trade with Smyrna
played an important role in discussions over the city in the English
newspapers ...” See “’Mr. Eugenides, The Smyrna Merchant,’ and
Post-War Politics in The Waste Land,” Journal Of Modern Literature
50.1 (Summer 1989): 173.
13. Times, 7 September 1921, 7.
14. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1964), 79–80.

85
Juan A. Suárez on the Meaning
of the Gramaphone
The gramophone is heard in a prominent, if squalid, segment
of The Waste Land. It appears in part three (“The Fire
Sermon”), in one of the emblematic moments of modern
degradation which the poem seeks at once to portray and
to overcome. This is the sexual encounter between a jaded
typist and a “young man carbuncular”—“A small house agent’s
clerk ... on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford
millionaire.”5 Their tryst is prefaced by elliptical views of the
city (the polluted Thames and its banks; the bustle of traffic);
invocations of death and decay; and by a brief passage, “under
the brown fog of a winter noon,” in which the ever-mutating
first-person narrator receives an ambiguous invitation from a
Mr. Eugenides, “the Smyrna merchant”: “Asked me in demotic
French / To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel” (WL 208,
209, 212–13).6 These contemporary scenes are haunted by
gadgets, mass-produced objects, and industrial landscapes
which render the present mechanical, jarring, lifeless, and
disenchanted. Take, for example, “the sound of horns and
motors” (WL 197) in city streets; the “empty bottles, sandwich
papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
/ Or other testimony of summer nights” (WL 177–79) on the
river banks; the “gashouse” by “the dull canal,” where the rats
scurry over moldy bones (WL 189–90); or the customs forms
which fill Mr. Eugenides’s pockets (WL 211).
As one more vignette of present-day decadence, the
exhausted rendezvous between the typist and her suitor also
unfolds under emblems of industrial modernity. It takes place
in the early evening, after work, when “the human engine
waits / Like a taxi throbbing, waiting” (WL 216–17). Home
from the office, the typist lights up her stove, tidies up, and
“lays out food in tins” (WL 223). Presently, her guest arrives
“with one bold stare” (WL 232). Once dinner is over, he
makes his advance, which meets with neither resistance nor
encouragement. The encounter is unspirited; the insistently
mechanical rhythm of the lines underlines its somnambulistic

86
quality. After he leaves, she remains prey to automatism and
machine conditioning:
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass....
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
(WL 249–51, 254–56)
The canned music of the gramophone clinches the mechanical
squalor of the entire scene and comes to stand for the vulgarity
and disenchantment of contemporary existence.
( ... )
[In] The Waste Land, the gramophone’s sound closes the
poem’s bleak, necromantic first half. Shortly afterward begin the
intimations of rebirth and redemption. Already the following
stanza evokes “the pleasant whining of a mandoline,” heard in
a pub on Lower Thames Street and the neo-classical splendor
of the church of Magnus Martyr, by Christopher Wren (WL
261, 264). The folk performance and the “Ionian white and
gold” of the monument offset debased modern existence and
its accoutrements. The following section, “Death by Water,”
contains a poignant memento mori; and in the closing fragment,
“What the Thunder Said,” the scorched, rocky earth breaks
into new life. The oppressive present is obscurely redeemed
then. Modern city scenes are replaced by timeless landscapes,
while the shrill sounds of contemporary life are displaced by
the rumble of thunder; by mythic invocations drawn from the
Upanishads; and by literary allusions ranging from antiquity
to the Renaissance. In the end, the choral voice of tradition
drowns the artificial sounds of modernity—among them, the
mechanical grinding of the gramophone—and restores to life a
hard-won, new organicity. And yet I will try to show that, if one
listens closely, it becomes apparent that the sounds of tradition

87
are played back by a gramophone. The organic, mystic unity
with which, it is generally agreed, the poem ends, is entirely
dependent on it. The gramophone’s prerecorded sound is the
condition of possibility for the entire work. In his attempt to
modernize the idiom of modern poetry, Eliot was shaping an
old medium in the image of a new one.10
( ... )
Although jazz (like ragtime, its predecessor) was primarily
a live musical form, its boom coincided with that of the
gramophone. It was dependent on it for its diffusion and full
impact. Jazzing and ragging, like all parody, depend for their
effect on knowledge of the original being transformed. They
presupposed a stock of musical references shared by listener and
performer, just like Eliot’s poem presupposed the accessibility
of the literary archive—played back as a mélange of broken
sound bites. In addition, jazz’s strategies of defamiliarization
and parody were favored by the distance that recordings created
between the music itself, performers, and audiences. As music
streams from metal tubes, horns, and pulsating membranes, it
loses its aura—its uniqueness and unrepeatability—and loosens
its ties to the personality, the genius, the body and the nerves
of the performer or composer. It becomes more controllable
by the listener than live music could ever be. Moreover, canned
music is forced to commingle, indeed to compete, with the
din of street life—“the sound of horns and motors.” The
performance is no longer bracketed off from daily routine; it
may now happen any time—as when the typist in The Waste
Land freshens up after “stooping to folly.” Once all types of
music are intimately woven with the ordinary, they appear ripe
for parody and appropriation.
Like music, literature in the electronic age is subjected to
a similar fall into the ordinary. And this not only because, at
least since romanticism, literary mimesis has been making
the quotidian its main focus of interest. Literature loses some
of its sacredness and solemnity when writing notes down the
automatic speech of the world and thus imitates electronic

88
receivers and transmitters. According to McLuhan, the
electronic media have a leveling effect (UM 247). Once the
channels are open, they carry any and all sounds, those of time-
tested tradition as well as—mixed in with—the most ephemeral
and mundane. A reporter present at the first demonstrations
of Edison’s phonograph at the offices of Scientific American put
it as follows: “With charming impartiality it [the phonograph]
will express itself in the divine strains of a lyric goddess, or use
the startling vernacular of a street Arab.”34 The gramophone’s
nondiscriminating ear then explodes the queen’s English
and places it in open competition with all other dialects and
inflections, and with sheer noise (DN 233). Hence in The Waste
Land gramophonics blows up stylistic uniformity, and with it,
extant cultural hierarchies. That is why Shakespeare and pub
talk share the same frequencies; or why the Upanishads, Pope,
and Dante blend in with jazz rhythms or the drone of city
crowds; or why Ophelia and Lil, the cockney working-class
woman, touch hands.
As do Eliot and the typist. She is, after all, the poem’s
originator; the one who gives Eliot his gramophone—electronic
memory, language transmitter, verse generator—and his desire.
She is ultimately the stand-in for authorship in the machine
age—she, the medium who takes dictation; the conduit of
voices, discourses, and noise which travel through her as
through information channels; the one in whom language is
detached from “the spirit” and its acrobatics and entangled in
technological networks. One could say that in his attempt to
modernize the idiom of modern poetry, Eliot grafted onto an
old medium the “minor,” marginal vernaculars of modernity:
the language of women, of machines, of popular culture. The
language of those with no proper language.
Notes
5. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 231–34; hereafter cited in text
as WL by line number, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950
(New York, 1971), pp. 37–55; hereafter cited in text as CPP.
6. It seems to me the reader is invited to cringe at the invitation
(“in demotic French”! no less), whose placement reveals that, for Eliot,
this kind of homoerotic possibility sounds the depths of contemporary

89
decadence. For another example of Eliot’s homophobic anxieties, see
Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (London, 1984), pp. 309–10.
10. This inverts somewhat Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the
content of a new medium is always an older one: the content of radio
is the written word; of cinema, the theater; of television, both the
cinema and the radio, and so on. See his Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (New York, 1964); hereafter cited in text as UM.
34. Anonymous, “Mr. Edison’s New Wonder,” Harper’s Weekly,
30 March 1878, 31; cited in Martin W. Laforse and James A. Drake,
Popular Culture and American Life (Chicago, 1981), p. 3.
Shawn R. Tucker on Anxiety in The Waste Land
Temporal markers in The Waste Land create the poem’s sense
of a permanent pending. The bartender’s repeated warning,
“Hurry up please it’s time,” and the hints of Marvel’s
“To His Coy Mistress” give a sense of urgency closer to
the proddings of Dante’s demons than any conventional
temporal progression. This sense of anxious urgency is
reiterated in lines like “And still she cried, and still the
world pursues,” and “Here one can neither stand nor lie
nor sit” (102, 340). Anne Wright points out that even
the confounded verb tenses and “the quasi-adjectival use
of the present participle[,] with or without modal verbs,
register anxiety over death and rebirth, stasis and change”
(165). She adds that the preponderance and “triumph of the
present participle as verb-form within the poem denies to it
certain completion” (165). Wright notes that such participles
dominate the opening lines; of the first seven lines, five end
with a present participle set apart by a comma. April’s cruel
“breeding, mixing, and stirring” match Tiresias’s “throbbing
waiting,” and St. Augustine and the Buddha’s lamentation
of the vast “Burning burning burning burning” (The Waste
Land 2l7, 308). As “The Fire Sermon” ends, these four
tolling present participles are followed by St. Augustine’s
prayer of thanksgiving and hope, “O Lord Thou pluckest me
out.” Yet this sentiment first seems to crack and deteriorate
in the next line, “O Lord Thou pluckest,” followed by the

90
typographical emptiness, and then the final understated,
tragic, and liminoid “burning” (309, 310, 311).
The Waste Land is also haunted by a phantasmagoria of
liminoid figures. The caged Cumaean Sibyl, afflicted by
both the prophetic vision of pain and the inability to die,
hangs suspended in a terrible, liminoid u-topos. In a similar
manner, Tiresias witnesses and vicariously suffers while he is
“throbbing between two lives,” including that of a male and a
female, and that of one who dwells “among the lowest of the
dead” in both London and ancient Thebes (218, 246). Also
suspended in a terrible transition is Marie, who looks back to
an idealized past, as she seeks to escape an unbearable present.
Even the disillusionment of the “hyacinth girl” betrays a similar
tension: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
/ Looking into the heart of light, the silence” (39–41). Reduced
to silence, she hangs between life and death. The disjointed
“conversation” among the upper-class couple in “A Game of
Chess” climaxes with this frantic interrogative: “Are you alive,
or not?” (127). The sense of being “neither living nor dead”
is nowhere more evident than in the mass of faceless figures
who “flow over London Bridge” (62). Eliot’s allusion is not
to the carefully arranged damned in Dante’s Inferno, but to
those in the vestibule of hell or limbo. Dante describes those
figures as “wretches never born and never dead” who “circling
and circling” seem to “scorn all pause” (43). Those in limbo
cannot go to heaven, and hell “will not receive them since
the wicked might feel some glory over them” (43). These lost
souls are denied “even a name” (43). Like other figures in the
poem, these flowing hordes, suspended between life and death,
experience a liminoid existence.
Besides the permanent pending created by temporal markers,
present participles, and liminoid figures, Eliot’s work focusses
on the unresolved middle of all of the poem’s mythic patterns.
In the Osiris myth, any final meaningful or redemptive telos
seems highly doubtful at best. The speaker in the “Burial of
the Dead” asks Stetson if the corpse “has begun to sprout” and
“will it bloom this year,” but a blurring of narrator, subject, and
reader comes before a reply is made (72). Yet the vulgarized

91
Osiris, buried in an English garden, resembles the victim of a
pulp-crime novel, not a regenerative life force. The focus on
the still-unresolved middle of the myth characterizes the way
the poem engages the journey to Emmaus as well. The fourth
stanza of “What the Thunder Said” alludes to the trip taken
by two disciples and the disguised and resurrected Jesus. The
moment depicted is before Jesus’s revelation to them, yet here
one of the travellers wonders about the identity of an evasive if
not illusory third person. This subject’s very nature and gender
are left ambiguous. In addition, Eliot’s note about the passage
superimposes on that subject an allusion to the hallucinations
of Antarctic explorers, which attaches even more instability to
the mythic journey toward revelation or redemption. As the
travellers are left questioning the very existence of the third
figure, any ultimate epiphany promised by the mythic journey
is, in the poem, forever deferred.
The fragmentary elements of the Grail quest are presented
out of their conventional order, and this not only destroys
any sense of continuity, but, like the journey to Emmaus
and the Osiris myth, it also perpetually defers resolution.
The first allusion comes in the context of foul fete with
Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, and her daughter by the Thames. Next
to the bawdy song used to portray this trio, Eliot places the
concluding line of Verlaine’s rendition of the Parsifal story:
“Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” (202).
This striking contrast vulgarizes the quest by association, yet it
also points toward its possible resolution, however premature
the celebration. In the poem’s final section, at the end of the
mythic journey, the knight finds a “decayed hole,” “tumbled
graves,” and a chapel that is “only the wind’s home” (386, 388,
389). The ambiguous resolution of that quest, like the other
mythic journeys, leaves both knight and reader suspended in an
indeterminate “no where.”
The Waste Land, like Pound’s “Kongo Roux,” mocks any
humanistic utopia or “new Athens” at the same time that the
poem, like Picabia’s “Monument to Latin Stupidity,” subverts
conceits of teleological progression. Eliot’s work undermines
utopianism and temporal, psychological, or mythic progression

92
by dissolving historical locations and subjects into one vast
liminoid experience. The last seventeen lines of “The Burial
of the Dead” display an “Unreal City,” which combines
Baudelaire’s cityscape, Dante’s Dis, post-war London, and
fourth-century Mylae. The same desperation and turmoil that
characterize the overlapping of the historical and geographical
locations apply as well to a succession of historical centres
of power: “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London /
Unreal” (375–77). While the Cumaean Sibyl shows this to a
lesser degree, Tiresias demonstrates the transhistorical and
transpersonal anguish of one who suffers both in postwar
London and in “Thebes below the wall” (245). The conflation
of Lil, her “ friend,” and Ophelia also collapses past and present
despair, and the image that floats through time is that of the
selfish and self-destructive Coriolanus. In The Waste Land, the
world of the Buddha, the Carthage of Saint Augustine, and
the present all experience a corresponding “burning.” Finally,
this conflation of historical periods, locations, and subjects
corresponds with what Eliot described as Joyce’s “mythic
method” of “manipulating a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity” (483). Such a technique, which
Eliot affirms is a “disciplined” method that “is simply a way
of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance
to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history,” applies to this poem as well as to
Joyce’s novel (483). In The Waste Land, this method subverts
any humanistic or utopian ideals of progress, as the work
develops a parallel “between contemporaneity and antiquity” as
corresponding “panoramas of futility and anarchy.”
Eliot’s poem, like other Dada texts, does not just register
disillusionment with ideals like humanism, utopianism, and
progress; it actively brings those once-“sacred” fundamentals
into question. The poem’s relentless ironies of a suicidal
Sibyl, April as the cruellest month, and Osiris as the pulp-
crime-novel victim subvert what we could call Aldington’s
sacra of human dignity and nobility. The final section of
the poem reinforces this reversal, as the image of a self-
destructive Coriolanus replaces the altruistic call for giving

93
alms, sympathizing, and exercising control. The poem’s
depiction of sexuality, which includes Lil’s abortions, the
rendezvous of Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, and her daughter,
allusions to Tereus’s rape of Philomela, the laments of the
Thames maidens, and the conflation of violence and empty
eroticism in the encounter between the typist and the clerk
further subverts any humanistic ideals. Elements of The Waste
Land’s survey of sordid sexuality correspond with conflation
of machinery and sexuality in Picabia’s “Amorous Parade,”
as when Tiresias describes the “violet hour, when the eyes
and back / Turn upward from the desk, when the human
engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (215–17). Yet,
where Picabia playfully subverts perspective, sexuality; and
the fetishistic appeal of machinery, The Waste Land’s abortive,
violent, and empty sexuality projects a permanent transition
that lacks any fulfilling pleasure, any redemptive renewal or
birth, as well as any centralized truths, transcendence, or telos
[vision of a final goal].
Works Cited
Aldington, Richard, “The Influence of Mr. James Joyce.” English
Review 32 (1921): 333–41.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London:
Oxford UP, 1975.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987.
Camfield, William. Francis Picabia: His Art, Life, and Times. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1979.
Chinitz, David. “T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide.” PMLA 110.2
(1995): 236–47.
Dante. Inferno. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Penguin, 1954.
Davidson, Harriet. T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1985.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” Dial 75.5 (1923):
480–83.
_____. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1971.
_____. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Valerie Eliot. Vol. 1. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace, 1988.
Hargrove, Nancy. “The Great Parade: Cocteau, Picasso, Satie,
Massine, Diaghilev—and T. S. Eliot.” Mosaic 13.1 (1998): 83–106.

94
Hay, Eloise Knapp. T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1982.
Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson,
1965.
Pound, Ezra. “Kongo Roux.” 391 July 1921. Rpt. In Sanoullet,
Michel. 391 revue publicee de 1917 a 1924 par Francis Picabia. Paris:
Le Terrain Vague, 1960. 106.
Sieburth, Richard. “Dada Pound.” South Atlantic Quarterly 83.4
(1984): 44–68.
Silver, Kenneth. Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde
and the First World War, 1914–1925. London: Thames and Hudson,
1989.
Tzara, Tristan. “Dada Manifesto 1918.” The Dada Painters and Poets:
An Anthology. Ed. Robert Motherwell. Cambridge, MA: Belknap,
1951. 76–82.
Turner, Victor. “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual.” Rice
University Studies (1974): 53–92.
Wright, Anne. Literature of Crisis, 1910–1922. London: Macmillan,
1984.
Thomas Dilworth on Sex Between the Typist
and the Young Man
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
(lines 224–25)
In what may be the least obtrusively allusive episode in
Eliot’s poem and, perhaps for that reason, the most memorable,
Tiresias witnesses “the typist home at teatime” (line 222)
having meaningless sex with “the young man carbuncular”
(231). The young man acts merely as an agent of lust, not
as an emotionally and morally complete person. This may
account for the absence of a subject in sentences in which
he acts: “Endeavours to engage her in caresses” (237) and
“Bestows one final patronising kiss” (247). Owing to the nature
of his motivation, he does not even merit a pronoun. And
“she is bored and tired” (236), not even an agent of lust. The
word “indifference” (242) sums up her feelings. Emotionally,

95
psychologically, and spiritually, both of these people are
mechanical: he, equivalent—before the sexual act, at least—to
“a taxi throbbing waiting” (217), and she, merely an extension
of her typewriter or her gramophone as she “smoothes her
hair with automatic hand” (255). Except for the significance
of the absent pronouns, all this has been appreciated by
interpreters of the poem. But one significant word in this
episode has gone unnoticed by interpreters, a word half-hidden
by humble service as an adverb. It occurs in the apparently
innocuous statement that the typist’s “drying combinations”
are “perilously spread” out her window (224–25)—“perilously,”
because wind might dislodge and blow away clothing drying
on a clothesline out her window. In this poem, “perilously” is a
word of profound literary association.
In a poem whose title refers to Malory’s “waste land,” the
word “perilously” must evoke Chapel Perilous, the most
horrific place in Malory. In part V of Eliot’s poem, Malory’s
Chapel Perilous is reduced to a symbol of meaninglessness:
“the empty chapel, only the wind’s home,” a place of “tumbled
graves” where “the grass is singing” (387–90). The image
of wind and the word “home” link this description with the
typist’s bed-sitter. The wind, which is at “home” in the chapel,
is the cause of peril at the typist’s “home” (222). In part V, the
chapel is described but not named. In a sense, it has already
been named in the adverb “perilously.” The word identifies
the empty sexuality of the typist and her visitor with one of
the poem’s primary symbols of meaninglessness. It is a symbol
also of the absence of meaning, since a chapel ought to have
value, and this one does not. It is not even, as it is in Malory, a
place of terror to test the courage of a Lancelot. Expectation of
meaning intensifies meaninglessness.
This is also true of sex, which, in Western culture,
traditionally has psychological, cultural, and spiritual
significance. It symbolizes love, happiness, vitality, fertility,
and communion with God. The scriptural image for this last
is the wedding between God and humanity. The theological
hope is based on the widely shared sexual hope for ordinary
love and happiness. The absence of all such positive meaning

96
makes the sexual act of the typist and young man more
harrowing. Indifferent sex is the real Chapel Perilous of
the modern Waste Land, an act devoid of meaning and—if
we, unlike the typist and her young man, want meaning—
profoundly disappointing.
As “the wind’s home” where “the grass is singing” the
empty chapel also resonates with two other passages in the
poem. One of these is the arid conversation—actually a
combination of monologues, one spoken, the other interior
and silent—between the upper-class couple in the over-
decorated boudoir. The woman complains of “wind under the
door” and asks “What is the wind doing?” (118–19). As she
brushes her hair, it is like the singing grass of Chapel Perilous:
“under the brush, her hair / Spread out in fiery points /
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still” (108–10).
The static electricity of her dry hair—in contrast to the “wet”
hair of the hyacinth girl (38)—suggests infertility. It also has
its counterpart in a surrealistic expression of infertility in part
V: “A woman drew her long black hair out tight / And fiddled
whisper music on those strings” (378–79). The passage goes
on to describe “bats with baby faces,” which suggest aborted
fetuses and the arid intercourse of flaccid “upside down [ ... ]
towers” and “empty cisterns and exhausted wells” (383–85)—
”empty” like the chapel. These passages extend and intensify
the association of loveless sexuality with “the empty chapel,
only the wind’s home.”
In its references to Hindu scriptures, the New Testament,
and The Tempest (where Ferdinand’s “sea change” corresponds
to Prospero’s conversion from vengeance to forgiveness), The
Waste Land is a poem of the possibility of positive change. The
reader may remember that, in Malory, Chapel Perilous is close
to the Grail Castle, where the right questions asked can heal
the Fisher King and make fruitful the Waste Land. So it may
also be true that sex, even when meaningless as in this poem,
is nevertheless somehow proximate to the kinds of love and
meaning it traditionally symbolizes—near but requiring change
of place, symbolizing personal metamorphosis. The chapel is
“only the wind’s home,” and “the wind” disturbed the woman

97
in her boudoir, but the reader may recall the symbolism of
wind in the scriptural account of Pentecost, where the Holy
Spirit is an agent of positive change.
Work Cited
Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1954.
Camelia Elias and Bent Søerensen
on the Influence of Ovid
What at first sight might seem to be a superlative instance of
the lexical fragment occurs in the following lines: “So rudely
forc’d / Tereu” (206–07). The word “Tereu” appears to be an
incomplete rendition of the proper name “Tereus.” There is,
however, another way reading “Tereu,” a possibility we will
explore in the following analysis. The word “Tereus” originates
in Greek and belongs to a class of words ending in a digamma
(a “w”). It therefore has an unusual conjugation pattern in
Latin: Nominative: Tereus; Vocative: Tereu; Accusative: Terea;
Dative: Terei; Genitive: Tereos. What we are dealing with in
the case of Eliot’s “Tereu,” then, is clearly a word identical to
the complete form of the vocative in Latin. (Indeed, a footnote
to the text in the Norton Critical Edition flatly states this to
be a vocative.) In Ovid’s Metamorphoses we find in Liber Sextus
an example of the vocative form of Tereus in a parenthetical
remark by Philomela and Procne’s father, Pandion, to the
barbarous Tereus: “voluisti tu quoque, Tereu” (“as indeed
you also desired, o Tereus”; a frequently used method of
representing the vocative in English is to render it as an
apostrophe—“o Tereus”).
The fact that Eliot capitalizes the word strengthens the
argument that Tereu is a form of a proper name, and we
might suggest this occurrence in Ovid as a potential direct
intertext for Eliot. However, in the facsimile edition (Eliot
1971, 43) the line originally read “Tereu tereu,” the second
occurrence is not capitalized. It could therefore be argued
that the first “Tereu” is capitalized solely because it is the first

98
word of a new line (thus neither of the two need be read as a
proper name).
( ... )
Let us now examine “Tereu” as onomatopoeia. To do so
we return to the Philomela myth. We know—from several
Greek sources (chiefly Apollodorus, likely building on a
now lost tragedy by Sophocles), via Ovid and Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus, and from numerous other more recent
treatments of the myth (Mathew Arnold’s poem “Philomela”
and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play The Love of the Nightingale,
to name but two)—that Tereus rapes and mutes Philomela,
who, after much suffering, manages to point to Tereus as the
guilty party and to revenge herself on him by helping her sister
Procne cook and serve his own son to him. Fleeing Tereus’s
wrath, Philomela is then transformed into a bird (often Ovid
is mistakenly retold as making Philomela a nightingale, but
actually it is Procne who becomes a nightingale, whereas
Philomela becomes a [mute] swallow) whose song is doomed
to repeat the name of her rapist. The name is not surprisingly
rendered as a vocative, usually repeated and served as an
exclamation, thus: “tereu! tereu!”
In Elizabethan poetry, the myth of Philomela and Tereus is
often referred to via a rendition of the nightingale’s vocative,
in an onomatopoeic representation of its song—Twit, twit;
jug, jug; tereu, tereu—creating a delightful pun on the English
phrase “to rue,” (that is, to regret your sins). The nightingale
thus exhorts her rapist to rue the day of his crime through
eternity. We find this in John Lyly’s “Alexander and Campaspe”
(1564):
WHAT bird so sings, yet so does wail?
O ‘tis the ravish’d nightingale.
Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu! she cries. (1–3)
Similarly we read in “An Ode” by Richard Barnfield:

99
Every thing did banish moan,
Save the nightingale alone.
She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
Lean’d her breast up-till a thorn,
And there sung the dolefull’st ditty,
That to hear it was great pity.
“Fie, fie, fie,” now would she cry,
“Tereu, tereu,” by and by. (7–14).
There is obviously good reason to think that Eliot’s use of the
word comes directly from these intertexts and that he preserved
the word in its vocative case because it served his purpose in
this section of The Waste Land, which is saturated through
and through with the vocative mode. A glance at the page in
question in the facsimile edition illustrates this fact—Ezra
Pound comments twice in his marginalia: “Vocative?” and
“Vocative??”
The first occurrence of “tereu” in the facsimile edition of
The Waste Land is, as mentioned above, in fact a double: “Tereu
tereu,” which further strengthens our suspicion that Eliot
quotes directly from Barnfield here, as opposed to Lyly’s single
“tereu!” We note, of course, that in the facsimile the phrase
recurs and thus becomes refrain-like. Pound struck out this
repetition, and it did not appear in the published first edition.
The reference to the swallow, which indicates that Eliot at least
got his Ovid right, was moved to line 428. Further editing also
expunged a further fragmented form (“Ter”), which, unlike
“Tereu,” cannot be explained as merely as conjugation of
“Tereus.”
To read “Tereu” as a fragment, one would have to explicate
the symbolic function of the word within the text as follows:
The excised tongue of the nightingale cannot speak in whole
words, as it is not itself whole anymore. Further, the first
excision of a letter/sound is that of the sibilant, final “s,”
which corresponds exactly to that part of the name “Tereus”
and requires a tongue to pronounce. We thus might propose
that “Tereu” functions as a phonetic fragment. However, the

100
more radical excision resulting in “Ter” cannot, of course, be
explained solely as a matter of phonetic inability caused by the
lack of a tongue, but perhaps could be seen as a more radical
excision that leaves only the root (radix) of both tongue and
word in the nightingale’s mouth.
Note
1. All references to the Norton edition (2001), unless otherwise
noted.
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. “Eliot’s Impact on Twentieth-Century Anglo-
American Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A
David Moody. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Ashbery, John. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987. Ed. David
Bergman, New York: Knopf, 1989.
Barnfield, Richard. “An Ode.” Richard Barnfield: The Complete Poems.
Ed. George Klawitter. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University
Press, 1990.
Davidson, Harriet. “Improper Desire: Reading The Waste Land.”
The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A David Moody.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber Faber,
1940.
———. The Waste Land. A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original
Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot.
London: Faber Faber, 1971.
———. The Waste Land. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael North.
New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Lyly, John. Complete Works of John Lyly. Ed. R. Warwick Bond.
London: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Available at http://www.gmu.edu/departments/
fld/CLASSICS/ovid.met6.html.

101
Works by T. S. Eliot
Poetry
Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917
Ara Vos Prec, 1919. Republished in the U.S. as Poems, 1920
The Waste Land, 1922
Poems 1909–1925 (includes “The Hollow Men”), 1925
Ash-Wednesday, 1930
Anabasis, a Poem by St-John Perse (Eliot translation), 1930
Collected Poems 1909–1935 (includes “Burnt Norton”), 1936
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, 1939
East Coker, 1940
The Dry Salvages, 1941
Little Gidding, 1942
The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950, 1952
Collected Poems, 1909–1962, 1963
Prose Criticism
The Sacred Wood, 1920
Homage to John Dryden, 1924
For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928
Selected Essays 1917–1932, 1932
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933
After Strange Gods (1933 lectures at the University of Virginia),
1934
Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936
The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939

102
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1948
On Poetry and Poets, 1957
Plays
Sweeney Agonistes (in Criterion), 1926
The Rock: A Pageant Play, 1934
Murder in the Cathedral, 1935
The Family Reunion, 1939
The Cocktail Party, 1949
The Confidential Clerk, 1954
The Elder Statesman, 1959
Posthumous Publications
The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts
Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, 1971
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, 1996

103
Annotated Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot. London: H. Hamilton, 1984.
A survey of Eliot’s life and career.
Cuddy, Lois A. and David H. Hirsch. Critical Essays on T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land. Boston: G.K. Hall Co., 1991
A collection of 24 essential essays on The Waste Land concerning
both criticism and publishing history, beginning with Edmund
Wilson’s 1922 review of the poem in The Dial, and including
essays by Conrad Aiken, I. A. Richard, R. P. Blackmur, Philip
Rahv, and Cleanth Brooks. The editors’ introductory essay
provides a history of critical approaches to the poem.
Grant, Michael, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, 2 vol.
London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1982.
Collects contemporary reviews of Eliot’s poetry and plays.
Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion
of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973.
A collection of eight essays in which scholars, among them
Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellmann, Helen Gardner, Donald Davie,
and Robert Langbaum, consider the poem in light of its time, its
manuscript history, its allusions, and its structure.
Rainey, Lawrence. “Eliot among the Typists: Writing The Waste
Land.” Modernism/Modernity, 12:1 (Jan 2005), pp. 27–84.
Rainey interweaves a careful examination of the original
manuscript drafts of The Waste Land with a discussion of the role
and the image of working women and, especially, typists, at the
time the poem was written.
Schwarz, Robert L. Broken Images: A Study of The Waste Land.
Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 1988.
Schwarz offers a comprehensive line by line reading of the
poem, interweaving commentary, interpretation, and extensive

104
quotation from works Eliot used as sources for quotation and
allusion.
Tate, Allen, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work. New York:
Delacorte Press, 1966.
Tate edits a retrospective symposium. This anthology includes
personal reminiscence and criticism by 26 critics.

105
Contributors
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s
Mythmaking; The Visionary Company; Blake’s Apocalypse; Yeats;
A Map of Misreading; Kabbalah and Criticism; Agon: Toward
a Theory of Revisionism; The American Religion; The Western
Canon; and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams,
and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor
Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between
the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent
books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998
National Book Award finalist; How to Read and Why; Genius: A
Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds; Hamlet: Poem
Unlimited; Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?; and Jesus and Yahweh:
The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the
prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal
for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of
Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans
Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.
Neil Heims is a freelance writer, editor and researcher. He
has a Ph.D in English from the City University of New York.
He has written on numerous authors including John Milton,
Arthur Miller, William Shakespeare, Albert Camus, and J.Â€R.Â€R.
Tolkien.
Eleanor Cook is Professor Emerita, Department of English,
University of Toronto. Her essays have appeared in publications
such as American Literature, Daedalus, ELH, and Essays in
Criticism, and Philosophy and Literature. Her books include
volumes on Robert Browning and Wallace Stevens, as well as
Against Coercion: Games Poets Play, and Enigmas and Riddles in
Literature.
Louis Menand is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor
of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard

106
University. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker
and the New York Review of Books. Among his publications
are Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, The
Metaphysical Club, and American Studies.
Sandra M. Gilbert is Professor of English at the University
of California, Davis. Her most recent publications include
Wrongful Death: A Memoir (1995) and Ghost Volcano: Poems
(1995), as well as The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:
the Traditions in English, 2nd edition (co-edited with Susan
Gubar, 1996). The present essay is drawn from her book-in-
progress entitled The Fate of the Elegy: History, Memory, and the
Mythology of Modern Death.
Michael Levenson, Professor of English at the University
of Virginia, is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism (1984)
and Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (1991)—both from
Cambridge University Press—and co-author of The Spectacle
of Intimacy (Princeton University Press, 2000). He has recently
edited the Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Juan A. Suárez teaches American Literature at the University
of Murcia, Spain. He is the author of Bike Boys, Drag Queens,
and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in
the 1960s Underground Cinema (1996) and Popular Modernism:
Noise and the Reinvention of the Everday.
Shawn R. Tucker is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary
studies at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina. He holds
a Ph.D. in humanities from Florida State University, and his
research focuses on both early-twentieth-century modernism
and humanities pedagogy.
Thomas Dilworth is the Killam Fellow in the Department
of English at the University of Windsor. He is the author of
The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, and editor of

107
Jones’s illustration of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He has
written numerous chapters and articles covering a wide range
of poets.
Camelia Elias teaches at Aalborg University in Denmark. In
addition to having published numerous articles, she has also
edited two volumes of Cultural Text Studies, and published a
volume entitled The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a
Performative Genre.
Bent Søerensen teaches at Aalborg University in Denmark, and
has edited several volumes of Cultural Text Studies. His articles
have appeared in numerous publications including Comparative
Critical Studies, Orbis Litterarum, Literary Research, and The
Explicator.

108
Acknowledgments
Cook, Eleanor. “T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace.”
English Literary History 46 (1979): pp. 341–355. © 1979
by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with
permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Menand, Louis. “Problems About Texts.” Discovering Modernism:
T. S. Eliot and His Context. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987, pp. 75–94. © 1987 by Oxford University Press.
Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “â†œ‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism,
and the (Anti)Pastoral Elegy.” New Literary History: A Journal
of Theory and Interpretation 30:1 (Winter 1999), pp. 179–201.
© New Literary History, University of Virginia. Reprinted
with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Levenson, Michael. “Does The Waste Land Have a Politics?”
Modernism/Modernity 6:3 (Sept 1999), pp. 1–13. © by The
Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission
of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Suárez, Juan A. “T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Gramophone
and the Modernist Discourse Network.” New Literary History:
32:3 (Summer 2001), pp. 747–768. © New Literary History,
University of Virginia. Reprinted with permission of The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tucker, Shawn R., “The Waste Land, Liminoid Phenomena, and
the Confluence of Dada.” This article originally appeared in
Mosiac, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature,
Vol 34, Issue 3, pp. 91–110.
Dilworth, Thomas. “Eliot’s The Waste Land.” The Explicator 61:1
(Fall 2002) pp. 43. Reprinted with permission of the Helen
Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Published by Heldref

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Publications, 1319 Eighteenth Street, NW, Washington, DC
20036-1802. Copyright © 2002.
Elias, Camelia and Bent Søerensen. “Eliot’s The Waste Land.”
The Explicator 62:2 (Winter 2004), pp. 110. Reprinted with
permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.
Published by Heldref Pubications, 1319 Eighteenth Street,
NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802. Copyright © 2002.
Every effort has been made to contact the owners of
copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles
appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in
their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In
some cases foreign language text has been removed from the
original essay. Those interested in locating the original source
will find bibliographic information in the bibliography and
acknowledgments sections of this volume.

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Index
A
Adams, Henry, 56
Adonais (Shelley), 70
Aeneid (Virgil)
The Waste Land compared to,
54–55
Aeschylus
Eumenides, 18
Aiken, Conrad
friendship to Eliot, 15–16, 19,
57
“Alexander and Campaspe” (Lyly),
98–99
Allusions in The Waste Land
biblical, 23, 25, 32, 34–36, 45,
47–49
cubism, 32–33
literature, 23, 32–39, 42–46
ragtime, 27, 40–41
transformations of, 27
American literature
influence of, 19
modernism, 20, 60, 66, 75–77,
87–88
poets, 11, 13
writers, 19, 60, 64, 74–75, 87
Anderson, Julia, 20
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)
allusions to in The Waste Land,
23, 38–39
Anxiety
in The Waste Land, 89–94
Arnold, Matthew, 98
Ash Wednesday
faith in, 27
publication, 17
“As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of
Life” (Whitman), 12
Augustine, Saint
The Confessions, 25, 46
Augustine, Saint (The Waste Land)
allusions to, 25, 46, 54, 89,
92
B
Babbitt, Irving, 14
Barman (The Waste Land)
last call, 24, 41, 89
Baudelaire, Charles, 92
allusions in The Waste Land, 27,
37
The Flowers of Evil, 37
Beckett, Thomas, 19, 79
Bergson, Henri, 15
Biblical allusions in The Waste
Land, 96
God, 32, 47–48, 95
Jesus, 23, 25, 34–36, 47–49, 91
Moses, 32
Bloom, Harold
introduction, 7–13
Bradley, F. H., 15
Braque, Georges
allusions in The Waste Land, 27
“Breeding” theme in The Waste
Land
in “Burial of the Dead,” 30
Browning, Robert, 11
“Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came,” 9
monologues, 29
Buddha (The Waste Land)
sermon, 25, 46, 89, 92
Buddhist texts
46
Characters in literary works are indexed by first name (if any), followed by
the name of the work in parentheses

111
“Burial of the Dead” in The Waste
Land, 61
darkness, death, and decay
theme in, 34, 36, 40, 43, 46,
72–73, 80, 92
Fisher King story in, 23, 34–35, 42
month of April in, 30, 32, 71,
89, 92
narrative of, 29–31, 90
Spirit in, 33
summary of, 29–37
Bush, Ronald, 58
C
Cantos, The (Pound), 22
Central question of The Waste Land
quest out of waste land, 26–28
roots that clutch, 26–28, 32, 48
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came” (Browning), 9
Civilization in The Waste Land
classes, 27, 39
lives and culture in, 26, 29, 33,
47, 63, 92
living death, 29, 39
and the rat, 40, 43
rootlessness of, 26, 28
Cleopatra (The Waste Land)
allusion to “She,” 23, 38–39
Clerk, The (The Waste Land)
vanity, 24
visit to the typist, 24
Cocktail Party, The (play), 18
Confessions, The (Augustine), 25, 46
Confidential Clerk, The (play), 18
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness, 78
Conroy, Mary, 20–21
Cook, Eleanor, 78
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
(Whitman)
self-accusations in, 8–9
Cubist paintings
allusions in The Waste Land,
27–28
Cumaean Sibyl (The Waste Land)
eternal life by Apollo, 22, 29
longing to die, 29, 90, 92
D
“Dans le Restaurant,” 19
Dante Alighieri, 92
Divine Comedy, 51, 53, 89
Inferno, 90
Das Rheingold (Wagner), 46
“Death of Saint Narcissus, The,” 9
“Death by Water” in The Waste
Land, 19
death of sailor in, 23, 46
mournful tone of, 21, 83
poignant memento mori, 86
profit and loss in, 83
summary of, 46–47
Despair and disgust
in The Waste Land, 17, 20, 34,
39–43, 51–52, 92
Dial award, 19–20
Dickinson, Emily, 11
Divine Comedy (Dante), 51, 88
demons, 89
map of inhabited world, 53
Drowned Phoenician sailor (The
Waste Land), 61
death of, 23, 34, 40, 44, 46
Dryden, John
London, 54
“Dry Salvages, The” 9
Dunne, Annie, 14
Dynasts, The (Hardy), 78
E
Economic Consequences of the Peace,
The (Keynes)
politics in, 77–78, 80–82
Elder Statesman, The (play), 18
Eliot, Charles W., 74
Eliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns
(mother), 14, 19, 57
Eliot, Henry Ware (father), 14
death, 17, 19

112
Eliot, T. S.
awards, 18–20
biographical sketch, 14–18
birth, 14
childhood, 14
as critic and essayist, 18, 58–60,
62, 65–66, 75
death, 18, 21
education, 14–17, 19
fame, 17
illnesses, 17, 19, 21, 57–58
imagination, 56
influences on, 7–16, 19
lecturing, 57
letters, 58, 71, 74, 76
marriages, 16–17, 21, 58
mourning of a friend, 68–74
political and moral
conservatism, 14–15, 18, 21,
62
and religion, 14, 16, 18, 20, 27,
45, 55–56
works by, 101–2
Eliot, Valerie Fletcher (wife), 17,
21
Eliot, Vivienne Haigh-Wood
(wife), 19, 76
affairs, 16
death, 16–17
mental illness, 16, 57
Eliot, William Greenleaf
(grandfather), 14
Elizabeth I, Queen (The Waste
Land)
imagined on the Thames, 25,
46
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
essays, 13
Emmaus in The Waste Land
disciples’ journey to, 23, 48, 91
Eugenides, Mr. (The Waste Land)
customs forms, 85
propositions of the narrator,
23–24, 43, 85
wealth, 83
Eumenides (Aeschylus), 18
Ezra Pound (The Waste Land), 22
F
Faber, Geoffrey, 17
Family Reunion, The (play), 18
“Figlia che Piange, La”
writing of, 15
“Fire Sermon, The” in The Waste
Land, 61
Augustan view of history, 53, 89
death and decay in, 85
desperate turbulence of, 42
drafts of, 76–77
eroticism in, 43–44
frustration in, 46
gramophone in, 85
summary of, 42–46
Fisher King story
allusion to in The Waste Land,
23, 34–35, 42, 51, 54, 78, 83,
96
and the Holy Grail, 34–35, 42,
91
Flick, John, 20–21
Flowers of Evil, The (Baudelaire),
37
Four Quartets, 10
writing of, 18
Frazer, James, 63
The Golden Bough, 35
Freud, Sigmund, 70
G
“Game of Chess, A” in The Waste
Land
cupids, 37
diffuse and frustrated sensuality
in, 37, 39, 44
narrator in, 21, 39
“She” in, 21, 23, 37–39, 61
summary, 37–42
upper-class couple in, 90
“Gerontion” (poem)
narrative, 75

113
Gide, André
Paludes, 71
Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 35, 77
Gordon, John, 21
Gossip in a dive (The Waste Land)
story of Lil and her husband,
23–24, 41
Gramophone
meaning of, 85–89
music of, 85–86
H
Hale, Emily, 15
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
24
“Hand-Mirror, A” (Whitman)
self-rejection in, 7–8
Hanged Man (The Waste Land)
association with dying god, 23,
35
death, 34
Hardy, Thomas, 43
The Dynasts, 78
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 78
Hieronymo (The Waste Land)
salvation, 25
“Hollow Men, The”
publication, 17
“Holy Grail, The” (Tennyson), 9
Hulme, T. E., 76
I
Ibsen, Henrik, 65
Illness
in The Waste Land, 12, 33
Imagery in The Waste Land
branches, 26–27
broken, 27–28
compassion, 50, 52
light of God, 32
self-control, 50
stony rubbish, 26–29, 86
tarot cards, 34–35
wind, 95, 97
Inferno (Dante), 90
Isolde (The Waste Land)
allusion to, 22
J
James, Henry, 74
James, William, 15
Jerusalem in The Waste Land, 92
map, 53–55
Jesus (The Waste Land), 34
betrayal, 47, 49
crucifixion, 35, 47, 49
disciples, 23, 48, 91
resurrection, 23, 25, 35–36,
47–48, 91
Joyce, James
Ulysses, 17, 20, 58, 65–66, 92
K
Keats, John
influences on, 9, 11–12
Keynes, John Maynard
The Economic Consequences of the
Peace, 77–78, 80–82
King Lear (Shakespeare), 9
allusion to in The Waste Land,
39
Kreymborg, Alfred, 16
Kyd, Thomas, 25
The Spanish Tragedy, 51
L
Laforgue, Jules, 15, 71
Larisch, Marie, 31
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 11
Leger, Fernand
Leicester (The Waste Land)
imagined on the Thames, 25, 46
Lewis, Wyndham, 16
Lil (The Waste Land), 88
abortions, 93
conflation of, 92
sexual relations, 24, 41
story of, 23–24, 41

114
Lil’s husband (The Waste Land)
“good time,” 24, 41
return from army, 24
London in The Waste Land
destruction of London bridge,
51, 64, 77, 90
map, 53–55
unreal city, 36, 43, 49, 74–84,
90, 92
Love of the Nightingale
(Wertenbaker), 98
“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,
The” (poem)
influence on, 15
narrative, 75
publication, 16
Lycidas (Milton), 70
Lyly, John
“Alexander and Campaspe,”
98–99
M
Malory, Thomas, 95
Man with three slaves (The Waste
Land)
association with the Fisher
King, 23, 34–35, 42
ruler and spirit, 23
Maps of The Waste Land
Jerusalem, 53–55
London, 53–55
Rome, 53–56
Marie (The Waste Land)
coffee with the narrator, 31
interlocutor, 22
memories, 31–33
transition of, 90
Marvell, Andrew
43
“To His Coy Mistress,” 43, 89
Maud (Tennyson), 12
Metamorphoses (Ovid)
Itys in, 38
Jupiter in, 45
Philomela in, 23, 37–39, 43, 51,
79, 97–98
Procne in, 37–38, 98
Tereus in, 23, 37–38, 43, 51,
97–100
Tiresias, 24, 45, 50–51, 60–61
Milton, John
influences of, 9, 11–12
Lycidas, 70
Paradise Lost, 9, 32
“Mixing” theme in The Waste Land
Murder in the Cathedral (play),
18
N
Narrator (The Waste Land)
coffee with Marie, 31
death and rebirth, 33–34
failures and torments of
mankind, 22, 43
fortune of, 34
lonely soul of, 22, 35–36, 39,
44–45
propositions, 23–24, 43, 85
shadow of the red rock, 32–33
voices of, 22, 27, 32, 35, 39, 41,
44–45, 90
Nerval, Gerard de, 25
Nineteenth-century style
in The Waste Land,
Nobel Prize for Literature
and Eliot, 18
O
Oedipus, king of Thebes, 35
One-eyed merchant (The Waste
Land), 60
associated with Mr. Eugenides,
23, 85
death, 34, 44
Ophelia (The Waste Land), 88
death, 41
despair, 92
last words, 24

115
Ovid
influence of, 54, 97–100
Metamorphoses, 23–24, 37–39,
43, 45, 51, 60–61, 79, 97–100
P
Paludes (Gide), 71
Paradise Lost (Milton)
God in, 32
Satan in, 9
Pater, Walter
style and tradition of, 61–62,
64–66
“Pensées of Pascal, The”
on Pascal’s relation to
Montaigne, 7, 11, 13
Petronius
The Satyricon, 22, 29
Picasso, Pablo
Porter, Mrs. (The Waste Land)
daughter, 24, 70, 91, 93
keeper of brothel, 24, 43, 64
“Portrait of a Lady” (poem)
introduction to, 29
narrative, 75
writing of, 15–16
Postwar London
Eliot’s views of, 74–84
Pound, Ezra, 11
The Cantos, 22
edit of The Waste Land, 19–20,
22, 29, 46, 91, 99
influence on Eliot, 15–17, 19,
29
poetry of, 15
Prajapati (The Waste Land)
Hindu God of creation, 25, 49
salvation of, 51
“Preludes”
writing of, 15–16
Prince of Aquitaine (The Waste
Land)
and the image of a fallen tower,
25
Q
Quinn, John, 20–21
R
Ragtime
40–41, 87–88
“Rain” theme in The Waste Land
“Reflections on Contemporary
Poetry” (essay), 59
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
writing of, 15–16
Roman soldiers (The Waste Land)
torchlight red on sweaty faces,
25
Rome in The Waste Land
map, 53–56
Royce, Josiah, 15
Rudolph, Prince of Austro-
Hungarian, 31
Russell, Bertrand
influence on Eliot, 15–16
S
Sacred Wood, The
publication, 17
Santayana, George
influence on Eliot, 14–15
Satyricon, The (Petronius)
epigram in The Waste Land, 22,
29
Sea Drift elegies (Whitman), 9, 12
Shakespeare, William, 11
50, 88, 98
Antony and Cleopatra, 23,
38–39
Hamlet, 24, 41
King Lear, 9, 39
The Tempest, 40–42, 45–46, 64
“She” (The Waste Land)
chair, 23, 37–38
in “A Game of Chess,” 21, 23,
37, 39, 61

116
nervousness, 23, 63
wealth, 23, 27, 61
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Adonais, 70
influences on, 9, 11
Song of Myself (Whitman), 7
Sosostris, Madame (The Waste
Land)
allusions to other characters, 22,
34, 46, 70
clairvoyant, 22, 34, 63
cold, 34, 63
tarot cards, 34–35, 40, 42
Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 51
Spenser, Edmund
42
Stein, Gertrude, 20
Stetson (The Waste Land)
survivors of war, 23, 36, 90
“Stirring” theme in The Waste Land
Sweeney (The Waste Land)
lust and greed of, 24, 43, 64,
91, 93
Sweeny Agonistes (play), 18
Symbolist Movement, The (Symons),
15
Symons, Arthur
The Symbolist Movement, 15
T
Tempest, The (Shakespeare)
40–42, 46, 64
Ariel in, 45
Ferdinand in, 42, 46, 96
Tennyson, Lord Alfred
“The Holy Grail,”
influences on, 11–12
Maud, 12
Tereus and Philomela (The Waste
Land)
rape and mutilation, 23, 38–39,
43, 51, 79, 93, 97–100
Thames Maidens (The Waste Land)
betrayal, 70
pollution, 85
spirit of the Thames, 25, 46,
83, 93
Thayer, Scholfield
and The Dial, 17, 19
Thunder (The Waste Land)
personified, 25
Tiresias (The Waste Land)
anatomy of, 50–51, 69
convergence of all characters,
24, 44–45, 60–61
mere spectator, 44–45, 94
throbbing waiting, 89–90, 92
“To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell),
43, 89
Tolstoy, Leo, 78
“Tradition and the Individual
Talent” (essay), 56
doubt in, 61–62
ideal order of, 63
Western tradition in, 59–60
Treaty of Versailles, 56
Tristan und Isolde (Wagner)
allusions and The Waste Land,
22, 33–34, 38, 44
romanticism of, 38
Typist (The Waste Land), 82
bed-sitter, 24, 43
freshening up, 87
originator, 88
sex with the young man, 44, 64,
85, 93–97
U
Ulysses (Joyce)
Eliot’s editing of, 17, 20, 58,
65–66, 88, 92
Upanishads, 49, 85
V
Verdenal, Jean
death, 15, 21, 69–72
heroism, 72

117
Virgil
Aeneid, 54–55
W
Wagner, Richard, 25, 71
33–34, 44, 46
Das Rheingold, 46
Tristan und Isolde, 22, 33–34,
38, 44
Waste Land, The
character list, 22–25
critical views, 53–100
influences on, 9–15, 21
publication, 19
story behind, 19–22
structure of, 62, 64–65
success of, 19–20
summary and analysis, 26–52
writing of, 17, 19, 57–60, 62
Waste Land: Facsimile and
Manuscripts of the Original Drafts,
The
publication, 21
Wertenbaker, Timberlake
The Love of the Nightingale, 98
“What the Thunder Said” in The
Waste Land
biblical allusions in, 47–48, 91,
95
death in, 47–49, 51
eastern values in, 28
elegiac resolution in, 69, 95
infertility in, 95–96
new life in, 86
summary, 47–52
urban apocalypse, 53–54
“When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d” (Whitman)
death in, 9–10
the hermit in, 9–10
influence on The Waste Land,
9–10
Lincoln in, 10
Whitman, Walt
“As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of
Life,” 12
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 8–9
“A Hand-Mirror,” 7–8
influence on Eliot, 7–13,
69–71
Leaves of Grass, 11
Sea Drift elegies, 9, 12
Song of Myself, 7
“When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d,” 9–10
Woolf, Virginia, 20, 65
World War I, 15, 20
aftermath, 80–83
events of, 76–77
theater of war, 53, 56
in The Waste Land, 32, 35
World War II, 17, 19–20
Y
Yeats, William Butler, 47
Young man (The Waste Land)
conceit and appetite of, 44, 81
sex with the typist, 44, 64, 85,
93–97

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