Nick Mount on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

TS Eliot wrote the wasteland in 1921 mostly he wrote it in England where by that time he had settled permanently it was first published in a British literary magazine that Eliot himself edited called The Criterion was first published in October of 1922 the early 1920s were a difficult time in England difficult time politically difficult time economically like most good wars the war of 1914 to 1918 had created an employment boom but after the war ended that employment boom ended with it and left in the wake of it over 2 million people unemployed in England itself as a coalition government only vaguely in charge of the time not much further in the background of the poem is the Great War itself with 10 million people dead and much of Western Europe in ruin by 1918 much of the countryside in Europe that had been the inspiration for generations of European artists painters musicians and poets was in ruins it was quite literally by this point a wasteland buildings were destroyed that it stood for over a millennia if you go to the Hart House on this campus and go to the chapel that's on the ground floor go down and there sometime and have a look at the stained glass windows that are in the Hart House Chapel those windows were put together with scraps from broken stained glass windows in European churches destroyed by shelling in the First World War the pieces were brought back to the University of Toronto by graduates and students of this university who were serving in the First World War and they brought the pieces back here and they were reassembled into new frames in the Hart House Chapel a new kind of thought chipped away at people's recourse to the old explanations for war Darwin Marx Freud and others were slowly forcing people to accept that wars had less to do with angry God's than they had to do with angry humans past wars particularly in England past Wars had their glory it became increasingly difficult to see the glory in the First World War for Wilfred Owen and other creators of an entirely new kind of poetry trench poetry a generation had been sentenced to death by their parents for a few acres of mud in a poem that Ellie had published two years before the wasteland in 1920 an old man sits alone in an empty house and he asks himself after such knowledge what forgiveness after such knowledge what forgiveness that's the question that Eliot attempted to answer in the wasteland published two years after that after such knowledge what forgiveness the wasteland is a collection of fragments there are five parts in the poem the connections between these parts are far from apparent and within those parts there are many smaller fragments the fragments are not just Eliot's there are images quotations entire lines that are taken from other writers dozens of other writers there are over 60 different allusions in the wasteland to over 40 different writers in a half-dozen different languages past present modern ancient Western Eastern the wasteland is the poetic equivalent of those broken stained glass windows reassembled in the Hart House Chapel it's bits of culture broken up by war and reassembled into a new frame before the war when they were still intact when those stained glass windows and the European churches were still intact they looked out onto a single view they told a single accessible story maybe one of them depicted the life of a saint or the crucifixion of Christ but they told one story clearly if you took all those windows all those single stories and you smashed them to bits and you put them in a bag and he shook them up and you threw them on the wall you'd get the waistline it's the same thing as those windows Nardo's chapel there is not a single view in the wasteland there's no single clear view there is no single voice in the wasteland know single story what we get instead is many views many voices each reflecting and refracting the other much like cuba's painting which is arising at the same time if we perceive the world as ordered as meaningful then we will make and respond to ooh art that is itself meaningful and ordered but if the world is in ruins if history culture lies broken in trenches the bottom of Western Europe then we will make and respond to art that imitates that disorder humans are art making animals that's what we are I'll take my word for it ask Aristotle ask Hegel Sartre art making animals if fragments are all we have left then we will make art of fragments let me give you one other way to think about the form of the wasteland a way that is suggested by the poem itself the judeo-christian tradition has several stories of prophets who speak in tongues people who are taken over by a divine agent that speaks through them even though they don't know the language or even often what they're saying there's a condition that is very similar to this in the Buddhist tradition that Eliot invokes in part five of the wasteland and that is Nirvana in Buddhism Nirvana is the the peace the wisdom that is won by those who are no longer a self there an empty receptacle the passions have left them they have been blown out which is what the word Nirvana means Eliot had his own word for the state of being he called it in fact developed an entire theory of poetry out of it a theory that he called the impersonal theory of poetry the impersonal theory of poetry Seifer Eliot the secret to writing real poetry to writing a great poem was not to become more personal more individual the way the Romantic poets had to express the personality in the poem for alia the secret to real poetry was exactly the opposite of the what he strove for was what he called the continual extinction of the personality by suppressing his own emotions his own personality the idea behind Eliot's theory as well as that behind surrealist art at the same time was that the poet the artist could access experiences common to everyone because they were no longer a self no longer a person but a vehicle for the collective and that is what Eliot is trying to do in the wasteland to speak in and through many different voices none of them his all of them ours our inheritance there is no single speaker in the wasteland that's what makes it so tremendously difficult to read what makes it so tremendously difficult for most of the poetry at the time even most of its other poems himself the voice and the anonymous is and not the voice in the wasteland I should say is anonymous its collective the the working title for this famous poem was he do the police in different voices it's the working title that Eliot had to the poem it comes from a line in a Dickens novel our mutual friend in which two characters are discussing how one of their friends reads stories aloud from the newspaper and one of the characters says that I like the way he reads them because he do the police in different voices the world should be thankful that Eliot changed his mind about the title the wasteland speaks in many voices because Eliot is attempting to represent an inclusive human consciousness that is what Eliot thought popular culture meant he didn't think popular culture meant film television both of which he despised with the exception of bustard Eitan in Charlie Chaplin for a Liat popular culture a shared culture it's rooted in ritual in a largely unconscious shared sense of belong a sense that to him in the 1920s as a consequence of the First World War was largely in tatters but was still there the big problem with Eliot's theory of impersonal poetry in a poem that is as long as the wasteland is that all these fragments all these voices need something to hold them together people are generally not happy accepting disorder whether in a poem or in life Eliot himself was not happy with disorder throughout his life Eliot longed for order and for meaning in a way that only a truly committed skeptic can he wrote about what he saw and what Eliot saw in 1920s was not capital-t truth what he saw was many different truths broken up and fragmented by war but he also at the same time hoped that there might be some order beyond individual experience some meaning to life that was common collective he later found this order for himself in the church but for himself at this point in time he's not looking for it in religion he's looking for that order in literature and in myth for the wasteland he found a great deal of disorder in a single book Jesse L Weston's from ritual to romance book called from ritual to romance published just two years before the wasteland in 1920 in his notes to the poem Eliot tells us that he got the title the plan and a great deal of the symbolism for the wasteland from Weston's book Westen's book from ritual to romance is a book about the holy grail about the quest for the Holy Grail it's a legendary talisman that has been the object of questing adventures from Parsifal to Indiana Jones nobody really knows the origins the Grail or even what it really is the most well-known story of course is that it's the cup the Christ drank from at the Last Supper and later used to collect his blood as he died on the cross but it is generally believed now that the Grail substantially predates Christianity that it originates in pagan fertility rituals in which the Grail was a female sex symbol used in accompaniment with its male counterpart the bleeding Lance in the Christian tradition the bleeding Lance becomes the spear that wounded Christ on the cross there's a recent book few years ago by a professor in the history department here at the University of Toronto Professor Joseph goring who has suggested a new explanation for the origin of the Grail and that is that apparently there were paintings discovered in churches in the Pyrenees and these paintings depicted Mary holding a vessel that emits light and nobody knew what the vessel was so poets made up stories about the vessel that became the legend of the Holy Grail hence Dan Brown what caught Elliott's eye about all this was the way that let Weston linked the story of the Grail to another world myth and that's the story of the Fisher King the legend of the Fisher King it is also one of those stories that have been told many different times by many different cultures in many different places it's a world myth what Joseph Campbell would call world myth like the myth of the flood this is one version of it this is a 12th century French poem about Parsifal and the quest for the Holy Grail you can see parcel on your left in the lance and the Grail on the right the basic elements of the Fisher King story are this the death illness or sometimes just the old age of the Fisher King brings droughts and sterility to the land the idea is that the health of the king is associated with the health of the land because the king is divine so the wasteland that is created as a consequence of the illness of the king can only be revived by a questing Knight it has to be the right sort of knight Knight has to be pure of heart yes be purified before I can do that to put complete the task the knight has to find both the Grail and the bleeding Lance and he has to ask questions of them and if you ask the right questions the health of the King will be restored and the waistline will come back to life there are references to this legend that are scattered throughout the poem throughout the poem The Waste Land but the main function of them is more in behind-the-scenes because what the story of the Fisher King does for Elliot is that it provides the poem and by extension the world with the order that it lacks what this story allowed Elliot to do was to suggest that beneath the broken cobblestones of the streets of European cities beneath the modern city beneath the wasteland there is an old story a story that we all know a story that we all share even though it's now in pieces before you go in you should probably read the sign that's hanging over the door the wasteland and that is the epigraph the epigraph is in Latin the first difficulty of a tremendously difficult poem it is taken from a Roman manuscript from the 1st century AD called the Satyricon now the thing about this manuscript is that the manuscript itself in Eliot's time as in ours only exists in fragments so Eliot is beginning this fragmented poem with a fragment a ruin from the past what the epigraph is about is a character called the Sibyl the Sibyl of kamae the Sibyl was a prophet she's a most famously she's the gatekeeper to the gates of Hell the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid what happened to the Sibyl it's a lesson for all of us the Sibyl asks the gods for as many years of life as there were grains of sand in her hand and they granted her wish unfortunately the Sibyl forgot to ask for eternal youth along with eternal life so she ages tremendously and forever her most well known appearance in Western literature is in Virgil's Aeneid the story of the founder of Rome and he is of Troy she guides Annius into the underworld and shows him Rome's future glory but Eliot's quote from the Satyricon is about the Sibyl many many years after that famous event when she is now drastically aged the sill alive and in English the quotation reads something like this my translations will forgive it I saw with my own eyes the Sybil at KU my suspended in a cage and when the boys asked her Sybil what do you want she replied I want to die so guarding the entrance to the wasteland is a prophet who can see the future and she wants to die think about that before you decide whether now you want to enter the wasteland the epigraph does a great deal more than simply war in the reader of what's to come or set the tone for the poem what it also does is a line this poem with other poems through allusion first and most obviously to the Satyricon itself but also to Virgil's Aeneid because the Sybil is a principal character Lee needed and also by extension to Dante's Divine Comedy because Virgil becomes the principal character a principal character in the Divine Comedy what allusions do for Elliot in this poem starting with this one is connect this modern story with all of those old stories to suggest that it is part of those stories the many allusions that occur in the wasteland are partly multiple perspectives on the same scene but like a cubist painting different voices telling different same story from entirely different angles but the thing is that because illusion in a literary work or artistic work because illusion expands meaning because it connects this story with the story to which it refers all those different voices in the poem from other poems aloud Eliot as I a Richards famously said to write an epic in 433 lines you follow because the extending its claiming the whole of Western and a great deal of Eastern literature as part of its terrain this poem is significantly larger than this poem because it's all poems okay first stop part 1 I'm in the fourth stanza about line 60 we're in London this is the final fragment in the first part unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn a crowd flowed over London Bridge so many I had not thought death had undone so many sighs short and infrequent were exhaled and each man fixed his eyes before his feet flowed up the hill and down King William Street to where st. Mary will not cut the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine there I saw one I knew and stopped him crying stetson you who were with me in the ships of my lie that corpse you planted last year in your garden has it begun to sprout will it bloom this year or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed Oh keep the dog far hence that's friend to men or with his nails you dig it up again you epically elected montsum bob la mole Fred a crowd flowed under London Bridge where's the crowd going they're going to work these people are commuters say merry walnut strikes the hour of nine this particular section of the poem is set in London's financial district what Londoners just call the city as Welli it worked at the time that he was writing the poem because the man who wrote the wasteland was at the same time an investment banker with Lloyds of London in Eliot city in Eliot's time I should say this part of London the city capital C city is being to populate it residents are leaving the downtown core and moving to the new suburbs of London so by Elliot's time over a million commuters a day are entering and leaving an area of the city that's less than one square mile it's new it had not been seen before and it struck Elia does it struck many that something was changing the lines here also echo Dante's Inferno Dante says that he had not thought death hadn't done so many about not a crowd of commuters he says this about a crowd of people who are waiting outside the gates of hell people who could not choose people did not do good or evil because they could not choose and that illusion helps Eliot suggests the main idea of the wasteland which is that old stories lie beneath modern streets London is Rome London is Athens London is Alexandria London is Dante's hell the difference repeatedly is that those old stories those old places were meaningful authentic real in the wasteland the new versions of these old stories are lighter lesser emptied of meaning Dante says I had not thought death had undone so many about a crowd of people waiting outside the gates of Hell Elliot says it about a group of commuters think of your morning commute on the subway and each man fixed his eyes before his feet I had not thought death that undone so many in this modern Rome faith the church is just a time clock the rituals the stories that hold people together are in pieces the wasteland uses illusion to select its readers over and over again the last line of this section the line of French should I read has a line from Charles Baudelaire the flowers of evil it says you hypocrite reader my double my brother what the waistline is suggesting over and over again with these lace line with these illusions is that if you can read this line if you know this line then you feel what I feel because you know too that the past that I'm Avoca here is now in fragments for many many readers including almost all of my students the illusions in the wasteland do not open the poem up the way I was talking a moment ago the illusions close it down they make it hard to read I'm almost impossible to understand or even enjoy TS Eliot wrote in this poem but at my back in a cold blast I hear the rattle of the bones and chuckle spread from ear to ear it is an allusion to Andrew Marvell's poem to his coy mistress in part three of the poem excuse me Eliot's British critic Harold Monroe wrote but at my back I always hear mr. Elliott's intellectual sneer fair enough fair enough but the thing is that the difficulty of Eliot's illusions are part of their function the wasteland is a kind of test if you get enough of the illusions in the wasteland then you will share Eliot's despair because you obviously know the tradition whose death he is lamenting probably the most radical step that the wasteland takes that modernist poetry takes is that it is not at all interest in talking to everybody it has a specific audience in mind and it will leave most readers behind as a consequence of that second stop part to a game of chess this is about line 139 we're overhearing now a conversation that takes place in a bar this should be in a cockney accent when I do cockney I sound like what I am which is a drunk Irishman so I'm not even attempt it when Lil's husband's got demobbed I said I didn't mince my words I said to him myself hurry up please it's time now Albert's coming back make yourself a bit smart he'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you to get yourself some teeth he did I was there you have them all out lil and get a nice set he said I swear I can't bear to look at you and no more can't I I said and think of poor Albert he's been in the Army for 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 something of that I said then I'll know who to thank she said and give me a straight look hurry up please it's time if you don't like it you can get on with it I said others can pick and choose if you can't but valvert makes off it won't be for lack of telling you ought to be ashamed I said to look so antique and they're only 31 I can't help it she said pulling a long face it's them pills I took to bring it off she said she's had five already nearly died he on George the chemist said it would be alright but I've never been the same you are a proper fool I said well if Albert won't leave you alone there it is I said what you get married for if you don't want children hurry up please it's time well thats sunday albert was home they had a hot gammon and they asked me in to dinner to get the beauty of it hot hurry up please it's time hurry up please it's time I'm goona bill hoon i lu hoon i may hoon i tata who night good night good night ladies good night sweet ladies good night good night this is a snapshot of what the working classes are doing in the wasteland we're not in the banking district of London anymore we're overhearing women gossiping in a pub we overhear one woman telling her friend about another friend Lille and she says she's tailed Lille look your husbands come back from the war clean yourself up a bit maybe get yourself some new teeth Lille says it's not my fault that I look old it's them pills I took to bring it off she's had an abortion over top of this conversation we hear another voice a refrain repeated in capital letters hurry up please it's time what that is most immediately is the traditional last call the British bartender that's all he's doing it's the bartender telling them it's time to go you can keep drinking but you can't keep drinking here but it also of course suggests and anticipates the very traditional poetic theme of carpe diem seize the day hurry up please it's time to women talking in a bar about false teeth with a voice in the background saying it's time something is coming something is happening what we don't know nothing but more time in the wasteland so they leave the bar good night ladies good night sweet ladies good night good night those are the last words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet after she's gone mad just before she dies by drowning like many of the other deaths in the wasteland so Afilias tragic parting words one most beautiful scenes in western literature are now words overheard in a bar in a conversation about false teeth old stories beneath the modern stories in fragments a culture and ruins everything that was once meaningful has been emptied of meaning Shakespeare in modern England is just fodder for pop songs who that Shakespearean rag earlier in the poem the ancient poetic theme of carpe diem seize the day has become last call in a pub hurry up please it's time in Andrew Marvell's England the graves a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace in the modern England fix your teeth or you won't get any last stop last part what the Thunder said I Eliot wrote the final part of the wasteland in a small town in France he told Virginia Woolf that he wrote it in a kind of trance finally relaxed freed from the pressures of work he describes part five in his notes as the approach to the chapel perilous so what has happened in terms of the myth of the Fisher King is the night has now been purified early in the poem he's had his feet washed he's been purified by water and by fire and the night is now in the final part of the poem approaching the chapel where the Grail is before he gets there and before we get there we have to cross through hostile lands that the difficult passage of romance about line 330 in the final part of the wasteland started the beginning of the part 5 after the torchlight read on sweaty faces after the frosty silence in the gardens after the agony and stony places the shouting in the cry prison palace and reverberation of thunder of spring of a distant mountains he who was living is now dead we who were living are now dying with a little patience here is no water but only rock rock and no water and the sandy Road the road winding above among the mountains which are mountains of rock without water if there were water we should stop and drink amongst the rock one cannot stop or think sweat is dry and feet are in the sand if there were only water amongst the rock dead mountain mouth of Carius teeth that cannot spit here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit there is not even silence in the mountains but dry sterile thunder without rain there is not even solitude in the mountains but red sullen faces sneer and snarl from doors of mud cracked houses the difficult passage of romance the final passage before the entrance is the chapel which he arrives at a few stanzas after that scene now I say he but it is tremendously uncertain who this person is or even if it's more than one person Elliot says in the notes to the poem that all the men in the poem are one man just as all the women in the poem or one woman so at the chapel it finally rains water is returned to the wasteland when it rains Thunder comes the Thunder speaks it says one word the Thunder says da da da and where he got this particular old story from is from the east you got it from the apana shots the Hindu apana shots sacred texts from about the ninth century BC Eliot studied Sanskrit at Harvard I did not so I will mangle the pronunciation of the words that follow the story here is that God's men and demons all assemble in front of their creator raja puti god and they all ask at the same time they all say speak to us O Lord what's the meaning of life speak to us O Lord bridge appetit the Creator responds with one word da this is often the apana shots the problem is is that all three groups here da differently or perhaps just interpret it differently men here daata give demons here they advo be compassionate be compassionate gods here control yourselves one word three different interpretations by three groups which resolves none of the difficulties between them now with the warning that I am simplifying for the sake of summary here this is my best sense of what happens at the end of the wasteland at the chapel the Thunder Prajapati the Creator God whatever name you want to give him speaks the word of power da da is the answer it's the Holy Grail it is the meaning that is missing from the poem and missing from the world the problem is nobody quite knows what it means and so the poem ends with not one but three different interpretations of what the answer is before decaying into a babble of different voices in four different languages at the very end of the poem at the end of the poem the Fisher King is fishing I sat upon the shore fishing so maybe the night has been successful maybe the king has been restored to health and with it the wasteland the king is described as fishing with the wasteland via with the arid plain I should say behind me so the wasteland is still there but now it's behind you not in front of us the king if that's who it is wonders at this point should I put my lands in order and allusion to Isaiah set thine house in order for thou shalt die through the babble of the last stanza we hear the final words of the wasteland one word repeated three times shanti shanti shanti it's again sanskrit the word shanti means peace in silence as Elliot says in his notes Shanti is the Buddhist equivalent of the Christian peace that passeth understanding or of Nirvana for that matter now the problem for us the the problem for all readers of the wasteland is this it's very simple the peace that passes understanding passes understanding you know it can be experienced but it cannot be understood it cannot be shared and it certainly cannot be paraphrased not by me you either get it or you don't it is possible that whoever hears these words at the end of the poem has reached Nirvana peace but if so it's not accessible or even comprehensible to anybody else but that one individual each of us locked inside our own prisons in 1923 Time magazine did a review of both Eliot's the wasteland and James Joyce's Ulysses in the same review feel sorry for the reviewer the review opened up with this there is a new kind of literature abroad in the land whose only fault is that no one can understand it that's 1920s by 1950 Eliot's poetry had become what poetry should look like and now Time magazine put Elliot on the cover this cover of Time magazine March 1950 shows Elliot poised between a martini and a cross the caption along the bottom reads no middle way out of the wasteland two ways out of the wasteland drugged the census alcohol drugs abandoned the world of the senses faith Eliot chose faith five years later he found the order that he was looking for in the Church of England he was baptised in secrecy behind closed doors in 1927 if it is peace that this poem attains at the end then as Elliot says in his notes it is a peace that passes understanding it is private it is behind a closed door the meaning of the wasteland is ultimately individual private but that does not mean that it does not have meaning for me there is meaning in the wasteland but the things if I could tell you what that meaning was I would not be here I'd be up on top of a mountain somewhere in Nirvana you know me Leonard Cohen and Madonna just blissing out in the wasteland is a literary monument it is historically unavoidable it's maybe the most important poem of the 20th century it is also an excellent window on history Eliot had an almost clairvoyant sense of his time this uncanny ability to represent his time and how people felt about their time in words ten million people died in the First World War many of them used to be neighbors remember the anxiety generated by less than 3,000 senseless deaths on September the 11th and then try to imagine what it must have felt like to wake up to a world that had lost 10 million it is a cliche now to say that the Great War changed everything but the thing is it was not a cliche in 1918 it was new it was frightening Lee knew that sense of a bridge that had been permanently crossed a divide forever between the past and his frightening new present is what the wasteland and other shocking turns in western art were trying to invoke the world had changed and art was scrambling to keep up although Eliot later denied it the wasteland is in this sense a reflection of his time not just in the content but in the fragmented form of the poem itself but the thing is Eliot did not just mirror his time he also and probably more crucially taught his generation how to think of their time how to see it on the occasion of Eliot's 60th birthday the British critic William Empson who was 16 years old when the poem came out in England absence said I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he and do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented that's a remarkable admission to make right on the part of anybody let alone someone with the arrogance or professor and scholar attributing the invention of his own mind to another man that's how that generation saw Eliot the wasteland is crucially important for those who are interested in the past as I am as you are it is crucially important to both literary and cultural history is it still relevant to our time is it still a poem for our time there are certainly legacies of Eliot in our time we are much more comfortable I believe with fragments because of Eliot with mixing different styles and different periods in the same object these fragments I have shored against my ruins there are also Eliot's legacies of Eliot they were less comfortable with his representations of women his anti-semitism is elitism and probably for most his role in the enthronement of difficulty as the central criteria of modern art Eliot got some things wrong for what it's worth I think that he was mostly wrong about popular culture what we now call popular culture I think what Eliot could not see is that 95% of anything is crap it doesn't matter if you're talking about old poems the Opera or comic books or television only 5% of it is any good but I think he got the main thing right right for now for our time there is no capital T truth in the waistline there's just different styles different interpretations laid side by side living side by side existing side by side like those broken stained glass windows and Hart House like the Renaissance wrong but at the same time Eliot also held out the hope that there is some sort of order beyond the flux of individual experience an order in a meaning that is not necessarily known to us not yet but that is out there somewhere those conflicting positions towards the truth seem to me not unlike our own approach to truth our own time if we were truly as skeptical as the post modernists once made us out to be we wouldn't bother getting up in the morning much less doing something so epistemologically unsound as education as attending a lecture for instance I think that we are more like Eliot that we are cynical enough learn it enough experienced enough to doubt all answers but optimistic enough to hope that we're wrong that there might be an answer what TS Eliot is really lamenting in this poem is the loss of a shared culture something that can hold us together and I think that that is a concern that we can understand in 2009 thank you very much

Channel: Nick Mount

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Keywords: The Waste Land (Poem), T. S. Eliot (Author), Nick Mount, poetry, British literature, Modernism

Id: JO8rEIddgrI

Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2015