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The poem's title is often mistakenly given as "Waste Land" (as used by Weston) or "Wasteland", omitting the definite article. However, in a letter to Ezra Pound, Eliot politely insisted that the title was three words beginning with "The".Pages‎: ‎64 pp.
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  • Eliot’s Poetry.
  • The Waste Land Summary.
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In its original draft, the poem was almost twice as long as the published version. That's because T. Eliot pretty much used every one of these suggestions, and even dedicated the poem to Pound, calling him " il miglior fabbro " in the inscription, which is Italian for "the better craftsman. Maybe what Eliot should have been concerned about was penning a poem that's considered incomprehensible by many first-time readers the world over. Yep, there's no getting around it: "The Waste Land" can be one tough cookie to read.

The poem constantly shifts between different speakers without warning, and it's chock full of references to classic literature from cultures all over the world, many of which are more than a little obscure. Which raises the question, why oh why would Eliot want his poem to be so hard to read? Well, like many writers of his time so-called modernists , he felt that Western culture was headed to hell in a handbasket, and that people were getting dumber and dumber it's a good thing he didn't live to see the days of Conveyor Belt of Love.

T.S. Eliot reads: The Waste Land

So basically, his message to readers was: "Hey, if you don't understand what I'm talking about in this poem, go to a library! Apart from its obscure allusions , "The Waste Land" can be difficult to read because it constantly shifts between different speakers and scenes, often without warning.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot

At one moment, you're a woman reminiscing about riding on a sled when you were young; at another, you're staring at a dead sailor who's decaying at the bottom of the ocean. But no matter how weird things get, make no mistake: this is a very, very serious poem about a very serious subject: the decline of western culture and the beauty that this culture once possessed, back in the good ol' days of classic times.

Honestly, Eliot would probably go red in the face if you dared ask him "Why should I care? Even in the early 20th century, Eliot looked around and saw a world that was, in his mind at least, constantly being dumbed down by booze, atheism, and general laziness. While Eliot paints a bleak picture of human life in the modern world, he indicates that meaning can be found in life through the context of mythology. Maintaining his position between a bleak and desolate view of the present, and hope for a rebirth of civilization, Eliot leaves the answer to this question ambiguous.

Just as the Fisher King may one day reclaim his lands, Eliot offers signs that humanity may recover from The Waste Land. Eliot, T. Cary Nelson.

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Eliot’s Poetry

Did you take or are you planning to take a writing class at another school? You may be able to receive WR transfer credit for it. Click here. Competition information. Work Cited Eliot, T. Smith, Grover.


  1. The Waste Land Quotes.
  2. The Waste Land;
  3. Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims!
  4. The Waste Land. This page appears to have been lightly crossed out in pencil by Eliot himself. Although there are several signs of similar adjustments made by Eliot, and a number of significant comments by Vivienne, the most significant editorial input is clearly that of Pound, who recommended many cuts to the poem. Pound's note against this section of the draft is "verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it". In the end, the regularity of the four-line stanzas was abandoned.

    At the beginning of 'The Fire Sermon' in one version, there was a lengthy section in heroic couplets , in imitation of Alexander Pope 's The Rape of the Lock. It described one lady Fresca who appeared in the earlier poem "Gerontion". Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool, Fresca slips softly to the needful stool, Where the pathetic tale of Richardson Eases her labour till the deed is done Ellmann notes: "Pound warned Eliot that since Pope had done the couplets better, and Joyce the defecation, there was no point in another round.

    Pound also excised some shorter poems that Eliot wanted to insert between the five sections. One of these, that Eliot had entitled 'Dirge', begins. Full fathom five your Bleistein lies [E] Under the flatfish and the squids. Graves' disease in a dead Jew's eyes! Where the crabs have eat the lids This section is apparently based on their marital life, and she may have felt these lines too revealing.

    In a late December letter to Eliot to celebrate the "birth" of the poem, Pound wrote a bawdy poem of 48 lines entitled "Sage Homme" in which he identified Eliot as the mother of the poem but compared himself to the midwife. How did the printed Infancies result From Nuptials thus doubly difficult?

    Before the editing had even begun, Eliot found a publisher. To maximise his income and reach a broader audience, Eliot also sought a deal with magazines. Being the London correspondent for The Dial magazine [13] and a college friend of its co-owner and co-editor, Scofield Thayer , The Dial was an ideal choice. In New York in the late summer with John Quinn, a lawyer and literary patron, representing Eliot's interests Boni and Liveright made an agreement with The Dial allowing the magazine to be the first to publish the poem in the US if they agreed to purchase copies of the book at discount from Boni and Liveright.

    The poem was first published in the UK, without the author's notes, in the first issue October of The Criterion , a literary magazine started and edited by Eliot.

    The first appearance of the poem in the US was in the November issue of The Dial magazine actually published in late October. In December , the poem was published in the US in book form by Boni and Liveright, the first publication to print the notes. The publication history of The Waste Land as well as other pieces of Eliot's poetry and prose has been documented by Donald Gallup.

    Eliot originally considered entitling the poem He do the Police in Different Voices. This strange phrase is taken from Charles Dickens ' novel Our Mutual Friend , in which the widow Betty Higden says of her adopted foundling son Sloppy, "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices. What was lost by the rejection of this title Eliot might have felt compelled to restore by commenting on the commonalities of his characters in his note about Tiresias , stating that 'What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. In the end, the title Eliot chose was The Waste Land.

    In his first note to the poem he attributes the title to Jessie L. Weston 's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance. The allusion is to the wounding of the Fisher King and the subsequent sterility of his lands; to restore the King and make his lands fertile again, the Grail questor must ask, "What ails you?

    The poem's title is often mistakenly given as "Waste Land" as used by Weston or "Wasteland", omitting the definite article. However, in a letter to Ezra Pound, Eliot politely insisted that the title was three words beginning with "The". In English, it reads: "I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said, Sibyl, what do you want? Following the epigraph is a dedication added in a republication that reads "For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro ". Here Eliot is both quoting line of Canto XXVI of Dante 's Purgatorio , the second cantica of the Divine Comedy , where Dante defines the troubadour Arnaut Daniel as "the best smith of the mother tongue", and also Pound's title of chapter 2 of his The Spirit of Romance where he translated the phrase as "the better craftsman".

    The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes, purporting to explain his metaphors, references, and allusions. Some of these notes are helpful in interpreting the poem, but some are arguably even more puzzling, and many of the most opaque passages are left unannotated. The notes were added after Eliot's publisher requested something longer to justify printing The Waste Land in a separate book.

    There is some question as to whether Eliot originally intended The Waste Land to be a collection of individual poems additional poems were supplied to Pound for his comments on including them or to be considered one poem with five sections. The structure of the poem is also meant to loosely follow the vegetation myth and Holy Grail folklore surrounding the Fisher King story as outlined by Jessie Weston in her book From Ritual to Romance Weston's book was so central to the structure of the poem that it was the first text that Eliot cited in his "Notes on the Waste Land".

    The style of the poem is marked by the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts classic and obscure; " highbrow " and " lowbrow " that Eliot peppered throughout the poem. In addition to the many "highbrow" references and quotes from poets like Baudelaire , Shakespeare , Ovid , and Homer , as well as Wagner 's libretti, Eliot also included several references to "lowbrow" genres. The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot's interest in exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue.

    This interest dates back at least as far as " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ". The Waste Land is not a single monologue like "Prufrock".