On “The Waste Land”

“The Waste Land” has often been interpreted in a framework of spiritual angst, a view based in part on the many religious references, and perhaps also Eliot’s own uneasy embrace of High Anglicanism five years after the poem’s publication. But when you examine it more closely, this is not really supported by the text. The religious allusions are mostly from the Vedas or Buddhism, fueled no doubt by Eliot’s studies at Harvard, and are not so much in the form of religious faith as moral philosophy. To this author, “The Waste Land” is not at all concerned with religion but instead with what could be characterized as the Nothingness part of Being and Nothingness (not yet written, of course)—that is, it is not spiritual, it is existentialist. Existentialism is not religious; it is anti-religious—Sartre was militantly atheistic. In this context, religion could be characterized as something of a plug that people employ to shut out Nothingness, that is, to paper over a sense of purposelessness vaguely perceived but too difficult to dwell upon. This helps account for the strange anomaly of the universal agreement that “The Waste Land” is a great work, despite the fact that no one seems quite able to explain why. The key, I think, is in the Quixotic grandeur of the quest: “The Waste Land” seeks to look Nothingness full in the face, and this gloves-off determination to do so is the real source of the poem’s power. It also explains the notorious obscurity: the text is operating at the extreme limits of understanding, a place where language, shaped by the quotidian cares of everyday life, necessarily flounders. Hence poetry; in prose form, “The Waste Land” would be ridiculous.

One can’t trust Eliot on the matter. Consider his odd note to line 199, “I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines were taken; it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.” This sounds unlikely and, moreover, deliberately worded to sound unlikely. In his analysis, scholar Lawrence Rainey concludes, “this note may not be serious.” I agree: Eliot was prone to scattering a little sand in the eyes: for example, in the note to line 46 he delicately admits to having “departed to suit my own convenience” in making up [Tarot] connections; and line 356’s pseudo-academic note—“factitious,” according to Rainey—referring readers to Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, where they will find a misattributed quotation supposedly elucidating the line “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop.” I think these oddities can be attributed to Eliot’s wry sense of humor—one mustn’t forget that beneath the buttoned-down Establishment Englishman there always lurked the genial Midwesterner, not opposed to a gentle prank or two, even in the greatest of all modern poems.

In Floreat Lux, “The Waste Land” is introduced when Sabrina reads it in the forest while leaning back against the dragon plinth—it is not an accident that the really weird stuff begins at that point. The aim was that “The Waste Land”’s sense of uneasiness and menace should be present throughout the remainder of the narrative, and occasionally this is explicitly emphasized through episode titles taken directly from the poem (“A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon”) or alluding to it (“The Unreal City,” “Unburying the Dead”).

These notes on the poem are being penned at the beginning of April, appropriate given the famous first line, but actually the timing is coincidental. “The Waste Land” is a constant thing, a little nugget that lies just beneath the surface of consciousness, subtly shaping thought when thought runs in those directions. This author has three copies of it, which sounds obsessive but isn’t: the first is part of a collected edition purchased decades ago; the second is Rainey’s excellent 2005 study and annotation; and the third was a gift, a limited edition printed on handmade paper and signed by Eliot himself (signature pictured, and in that simple autograph we perceive again the plain Midwesterner, no?)

“The Waste Land” is frequently characterized as the greatest poem in Modernism, but in fact it might not even be the greatest of Eliot’s. Try watching the film of Ralph Fiennes reading Four Quartets, something done during COVID when there wasn’t much else for an actor to do, and see if that’s not the most engaging thing you’ve seen on a television screen in a long time.