'The Waste Land' Reviewed

The Waste Land. By TS Eliot. Richmond; Hogarth Press. Pp 35. 4s,6d,net

This poem is 430 lines, with a page of notes to every three pages of text, is not for the ordinary reader. He will make nothing of it. Its five sections, called successively The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, and so on, for all they signify to him, might as well be called “Tom Thumb at the Giant’s Causeway” or the “The Devil among the Bailiffs,” and so on. The thing is a mad medley. It has a plan, because its author says so; and presumably it has some meaning because he speaks of its symbolism; but meaning, plan, and intention alike are massed behind a smokescreen of anthropological and literary erudition, and only the pundit, the pedant, or the clairvoyant will be in the least aware of them.

Dr Fraser and Miss JL Weston are freely and admittedly his creditors, and the bulk of the poem is under an enormously composite and cosmopolitan mortgage; to Spenser, Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Middleton, Marvell, Goldsmith, Ezekiel, Buddha, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, St Augustine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and others. Lines of German, French, and Italian are thrown in at will or whim; so too are solos from nightingales, cocks, hermit-thrushes, and Ophelia. When Mr Eliot speaks in his own language and his own voice it is like this at one moment:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

and at another moment like this:

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

For the rest one can only say that if Mr Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste Land might not have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists and literati, so much waste paper.

The Waste Land was first published in the UK in the October 1922 issue of The Criterion, a literary magazine started and edited by Eliot. In the US it appeared in the November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine. The first UK book edition was published by the Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, in September 1923.

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