October 2022. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
1922, General Press, 46 pages. Written in English, read in English.
Me and poetry, we go a long way. But in parallel paths. Poetry on its own side of the road, and me, always on the opposite side. Over the course of my reading life I’ve encountered, even appreciated, a few poets, but given that my approach to reading poetry is very similar to my approach to reading prose, poems are finished for me much more quickly than the poets would have probably expected they should be read.
And so, I know quite a lot about poets and where they stand in the grand scheme of things, but not much of their actual work. Take T. S. Eliot, for example. I know he’s a contemporary of W. H. Auden, some of whose poems I love; I know he’s a contemporary of Ezra Pound, who has actually edited this poem, and whose work I very much did not like. I know he wrote “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which has later been translated into a very successful musical, but that was probably not the pinnacle of his work by his standards. And I know “The Waste Land” exists.
And so, I came onto this work, not much of a book but rather a long poem — 464 lines of it. And I’ve approached it in the same way I approach a novel, and so it was completed, all five parts of it, in under an hour. And apart from a familiar phrase here and there (“April is the cruelest month,” is the line that opens the entire poem and is rather well known), I can’t say I was much moved, or that I remember anything particular about it.
The poem has probably been much more significant for Eliot himself, if not in its content, then in its impact on his own life and the state of poetry at the time he wrote it. In 1921, Eliot was released from his work in a bank for an extended leave of absence due to what may have been a nervous breakdown. He travelled to Kent to convalesce, and from there to Switzerland to be treated for his condition, and throughout his journey he has continued to work on the long poem that he has already started thinking about several years before. Later, when he deemed the poem ready to be finished, he gave it to his friend Ezra Pound to edit it. Pound has brutally removed almost half of the original poem. Eventually Eliot’s work, and Pound’s reduction, have worked well for Eliot’s career — he made more money in the same year from the poem’s publication in book form and in a magazine, then he made for the entire year in the bank — and the poem has become one of the most important poems of its time.
Here, 80 years after the poem has been first published, I couldn’t find much of it in any of its five parts. Its many references have distracted me, and I could not find a hold in the surfaces that Eliot was describing. That’s mainly my fault, not his, and I will keep hoping to find the right door to poetry — however it will probably not be found here, in this waste land.
The November 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
The December 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence.
