Admittedly, “The Waste Land” has always intimidated me for a lot of reasons. I don’t have the proper educational background to understand all of T.S. Eliot’s references. Or, I am not “good at reading poetry”. The endnotes are tedious and exhausting to piece together, it’s a chore to understand. Whichever reason I choose on a given day is the excuse I have for avoiding it. And yet, there it was on the syllabus for this week’s class – and our subsequent first blog post assignment that I didn’t want to fail.
I wanted to write about Mina Loy’s feminist manifesto (especially in light of this week’s inauguration), and I even left Eliot’s poem for the last of all the readings. But this meant I read his craft essay that explains his approach to poetic writing and talent prior to attempting the poem again. Reading him in this way, I couldn’t help but be drawn to trying to understand the famous poem that arose from cultural ideologies, and so I took an approach this time that led me to researching the culture in which Eliot was immersed in the early 20th century; the conversations and ideas that influenced his work and thought to create a “science experiment” of all conglomerate pieces coursing through his mind, and one that ultimately led to his publication of “The Waste Land” in 1922.
In this response, I draw upon our assigned reading of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920) and, additionally, David Tomlinson’s “T.S. Eliot and the Cubists” (1980) to better understand how “The Waste Land” displays the influence of the culture around Eliot in the years preceding, and up to, the poem’s publication. Tomlinson’s timeline and comparisons between Eliot’s initial schooling in Paris in 1911 – and devotion to Henri Bergson’s ideas on creative evolution – to his “gradual convergence” (Tomlinson 70) to Cubist motifs work to display Eliot’s overarching idea in his essay we read for this week’s class. In it, Eliot draws an analogy of the poet’s mind as a “shred of platinum” that is “introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.” This concept is very much aligned with Bergson’s lecture (here is an introduction) that Eliot attended in Paris early in his schooling. Though I’ve not read the book, I understand that Creative Evolution is a scientific approach to creativity (Bergson was, after all, a mathematician) heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. We can gleam much of its essential ideology from our reading of Eliot’s essay on tradition and talent.
The concept of creative evolution is an idea that Eliot conveys throughout this essay: that the “mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” Here, too, we can see the influence of Cubism on his thought. Tomlinson’s timeline tells us that Eliot was introduced to the “Cubist School” during his time in Paris, as well as to critic Jacques Rivière, who later published “reviews of the cubists in the issue of May, 1912, and again in June, 1913” (71).
Eliot endeavored to remove emotion from his work completely. The reason for his effort might be understood here: “The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”
In my research I also found this comprehensive breakdown (bernytan.com) depicting where and what Eliot references throughout the poem (click to enlarge).
All of this understanding of how T.S. Eliot arrived to the publication of “The Waste Land” doesn’t necessarily aid me in fully understanding the words on the page, but it does make it less intimidating as a reader. He was completely immersed in conversations and ideologies, some of which fused together in his mind to produce “The Waste Land.”
I’m curious about everyone’s experience as readers with this poem. I’ve always had the impression it is notoriously difficult and convoluted. Somewhere during this research I read that Eliot added endnotes later at the request of a publisher, in order to make the publication of the poem into its own book worthwhile in length. Later, in 1957’s “Frontier’s of Criticism”, Eliot says, “I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes, but now they can never be unstuck…I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.”
Other than my general questions about your experience with “The Waste Land”, I am also curious whether we are able to define any cultural movements that might influence us as writers and thinkers today. Any significant cultural movements or works that could impact our thought as drastically as Darwin’s influenced Bergson’s, influenced Eliot’s?
When you mention the “concept of creative evolution,” I thought of the continual practice of Ezra Pound to at once hone and expand his craft by jumping from one school of American poetry to another. As a poet, I enjoy new challenges and new styles of poetry– it’s refreshing to see the different techniques that are being invented and played upon. The other thought, the mind as a receptacle, is one that we may be familiar with, but I’m wondering if it was a new idea then? Was that idea an entirely new concept to the Western world, or was there something like that already?
This was my first time reading “The Waste Land” straight through without the interruption of notes. While the context provided by the notes is helpful, I can understand why Eliot might wrestle with the idea of whether their inclusion really helps the poem. Perhaps they are necessary for critics like himself to gain a greater understanding of the moves the poet wants to make, but I wonder if they might otherwise hinder a more simple enjoyment of the text. This line of thinking also leads me to wonder if this poem might be considered on the brink of postmodernism, being a collection of multicultural references. Another meditation I look forward to tackling is the one you propose in your post about our own cultural infleunces and the potential for them to be even more varied than those of T.S. Eliot.