The Waste Land - FULL
Audio Book - by
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land is a 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in
1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the
20th century."[1]
Despite the poem's obscurity[2]—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures—the poem has become a familiar touchstone of modern literature.
WRITING
Eliot probably worked on what was to become The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In a letter to
New York lawyer and patron of modernism
John Quinn dated 9 May
1921, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which
I am wishful to finish."[4]
TITLE
Eliot originally considered titling the poem He do the
Police in
Different Voices.[19] In the version of the poem Eliot brought back from
Switzerland, the first two sections of the poem—'
The Burial of the Dead' and '
A Game of Chess'—appeared under this title. 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." Some critics use this working title to support the theory that, while there are many different voices (speakers) in the poem, there is only one central consciousness. 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
.
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?" A poem strikingly similar in theme and language called
Waste Land, written by
Madison Cawein, was published in 1913.[20]
The poem's title is often mistakenly given as "Waste Land" (as used by
Weston) or "
Wasteland"
STRUCTURE
The poem is preceded by a
Latin and
Greek epigraph from
The Satyricon of
Petronius. In
English, it reads: "I saw with my own eyes the
Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die."
Following the epigraph is a dedication (added in a 1925 republication) that reads "For
Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro" Here Eliot is both quoting line
117 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 (1910) where he translated the phrase as "the better craftsman
."[22] This dedication was originally written in ink by Eliot in the 1922
Boni & Liveright edition of the poem presented to Pound; it was subsequently included in future editions.[23]
The five parts of The Waste Land are titled:
The Burial of the Dead
A Game of Chess
The Fire Sermon
Death by Water
What the Thunder Said
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.[G]
Thirty years after publishing the poem with these notes, Eliot expressed his regret at "having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after
Tarot cards and the
Holy Grail".[24]
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 (
1920). 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."
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- published: 11 Jan 2013
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