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Summary
Summary
A Penguin Classic
While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective. This edition includes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Gerontion," and more.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Author Notes
T. S. Eliot is considered by many to be a literary genius and one of the most influential men of letters during the half-century after World War I. He was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot attended Harvard University, with time abroad pursuing graduate studies at the Sorbonne, Marburg, and Oxford. The outbreak of World War I prevented his return to the United States, and, persuaded by Ezra Pound to remain in England, he decided to settle there permanently.
He published his influential early criticism, much of it written as occasional pieces for literary periodicals. He developed such doctrines as the "dissociation of sensibility" and the "objective correlative" and elaborated his views on wit and on the relation of tradition to the individual talent. Eliot by this time had left his early, derivative verse far behind and had begun to publish avant-garde poetry (including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which exploited fresh rhythms, abrupt juxtapositions, contemporary subject matter, and witty allusion. This period of creativity also resulted in another collection of verse (including "Gerontian") and culminated in The Waste Land, a masterpiece published in 1922 and produced partly during a period of psychological breakdown while married to his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot.
In 1922, Eliot became a director of the Faber & Faber publishing house, and in 1927 he became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Thereafter, his career underwent a change. With the publication of Ash Wednesday in 1930, his poetry became more overtly Christian. As editor of the influential literary magazine The Criterion, he turned his hand to social as well as literary criticism, with an increasingly conservative orientation. His religious poetry culminated in Four Quartets, published individually from 1936 onward and collectively in 1943. This work is often considered to be his greatest poetic achievement. Eliot also wrote poetry in a much lighter vein, such as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection that was used during the early 1980s as the basis for the musical, Cats.
In addition to his contributions in poetry and criticism, Eliot is the pivotal verse dramatist of this century. He followed the lead of William Butler Yeats in attempting to revive metrical language in the theater. But, unlike Yeats, Eliot wanted a dramatic verse that would be self-effacing, capable of expressing the most prosaic passages in a play, and an insistent, undetected presence capable of elevating itself at a moment's notice. His progression from the pageant The Rock (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935), written for the Canterbury Festival, through The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949), a West End hit, was thus a matter of neutralizing obvious poetic effects and bringing prose passages into the flow of verse.
Recent critics have seen Eliot as a divided figure, covertly attracted to the very elements (romanticism, personality, heresy) he overtly condemned. His early attacks on romantic poets, for example, often reveal him as a romantic against the grain. The same divisions carry over into his verse, where violence struggles against restraint, emotion against order, and imagination against ironic detachment. This Eliot is more human and more attractive to contemporary taste. During his lifetime, Eliot received many honors and awards, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Randy Malamud's Introduction to The Waste Land and Other Poems If we regard Eliot's first two collections as thesis/antithesis, then the synthesis was accompanied by (and probably in many ways facilitated by) a personal breakdown in 1921. The Waste Land is a record of the poet's collapse, as well as the sign of his recovery. As he traveled back from Switzerland, where he had undergone treatment, to resume his life in England, Eliot left a draft of the poem in Paris for Ezra Pound to edit. The poem records a nervous breakdown, but more importantly it recounts how the poet imposes a sense of order, coherence, and direction on the cacophonous chaos of the breakdown. Explicitly, the breakdown in The Waste Land is meant to be the breakdown of Europe, but increasingly critics have come to realize that it is also the very personal account of Eliot's own psychological distress. In part III, for example, he writes, "'On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.'" The beach at Margate was where Eliot had vacationed, following a friend's advice, in an attempt to avert his breakdown; but the holiday did not ameliorate his situation and prompted him to seek the therapeutic assistance of a Lausanne psychologist, Dr. Henri Vittoz. And when the voice of the poem states (in an unusual first-person address) in line 182, "By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . ." Eliot is describing the simple, powerful nadir of his breakdown: Leman is the old name for Lake Geneva, which Lausanne overlooks. Although Eliot always resisted autobiographical readings of art, the poem inescapably invites such readings. In the closing lines, when Eliot writes "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," it seems impossible not to read that as a description of how Eliot's embrace and desperate association of the shards that comprise the poem have helped to stave off his psychological "ruins." The act of assembling these pieces of the European cultural tradition served as a bulwark against the intellectual collapse--in both his public and private worlds--that seemed so imminent. On the national level, the breakdown Eliot envisioned was a consequence of the state of Europe during and after the Great War. More personally, the poem can be read as an account from the trenches of a poet who, though he didn't actually fight in that war, fought and survived his own metaphorical war. (Critics have speculated that Virginia Woolf's Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked poet manqué in Mrs. Dalloway , was at least loosely inspired by her erstwhile friend Tom.) The Waste Land achieves a synthesis between the free-floating observations of Prufrock and the anguished, surreal pretensions of Poems 1920 . The philosophical/intellectual praxis of Eliot's modern epic is less gratuitous, and more pragmatic, than what he propounded in his previous collection--still difficult and harsh, certainly, but in a way that lent itself (at least for Eliot's initiates, his devotees) to solving, working through. If Poems 1920 was (and was meant to be) off-putting, The Waste Land was somehow, despite itself, addictively compelling. The themes, the tropes, the images, the aesthetic that Eliot created in that poem are still going strong, inescapably etched into our cultural consciousness nearly a century later. (For example, it is virtually impossible to read any newspaper in any April without a headline recalling that it is "the cruelest month.") Eliot postulated that the modern landscape looked harsh, hostile, crazy, fragmented, with the monuments of the past tormenting us amid our present unworthiness and inadequacy, and apparently he was right. A first-time reader confronted with The Waste Land must determine, at the outset, how to read the poem: how to assimilate it and make sense of it. It is, of course, "modern," so one approaches it with the same understanding of modern aesthetics that one brings to Picasso's cubism, or Stravinsky's symphonies, or Diaghilev's dance. One allows that the apparent chaos of the work, the difficulty, the excess, is in some way mimetic of the dazzling and sometimes incoherent world outside; and also that things will not be presented in a neat, clear narrative structure, because anything too conventional or too easily accessible would be consequently trite--one must work hard to glean important insights from the modern zeitgeist. Modernists believed that the more complex a text is, the more likely it is to do justice to the complexity of the world outside, a world that in the space of one generation is awakening to cinema, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, world war, and so forth. The poem suggests many schemes or models--probably far too many--that offer aids to comprehension. Some of these come from Eliot's own critical apparatus: The notes at the end of the poem, for example, promise insights. The endnotes were not included with the first two periodical publications of the poem--in The Criterion (London) in October 1922 and in The Dial (New York) the next month; they appeared only with the first book edition. Eliot once said that the publishers of this edition "wanted a larger volume and the notes were the only available matter," and in a 1957 lecture he referred to them as a "remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship." In fact, the notes vary greatly in relevance and usefulness. Excerpted from The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | p. 1 |
Preludes | p. 11 |
Gerontion | p. 17 |
Sweeney Among the Nightingales | p. 23 |
The Waste Land | p. 27 |
I. The Burial of the Dead | p. 29 |
II. A Game of Chess | p. 32 |
III. The Fire Sermon | p. 36 |
IV. Death by Water | p. 41 |
V. What the Thunder Said | p. 42 |
Notes on 'The Waste Land' | p. 47 |
Ash-Wednesday | p. 55 |
Journey of the Magi | p. 67 |
Marina | p. 71 |
Landscapes | p. 75 |
I. New Hampshire | p. 77 |
II. Virginia | p. 77 |
III. Usk | p. 78 |
Two Choruses from 'The Rock' | p. 79 |