This week we wander through The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Written in the aftermath of the Great War, this long poem uses a diverse array of voices to convey a sense of disillusionment with modern life. Those voices range from the parodic to the sacred, as the poem interweaves hundreds of allusions to mythology, major world religions, literary classics, dance hall tunes, a nursery rhyme, and conversations from daily English life. So we discuss what to make of so many fragmentary images and sounds, while also asking how they reflect a postwar moment of dramatic historical and cultural change.
Two specialists, both of whom are poets and literary scholars, offer wonderful contributions to this episode. An interview with Gabrielle McIntire, who is Professor of English at Queen’s University in Canada and editor of The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, orients our conversation about this poem. And notably, her own debut poetry collection, Unbound, comes out next month. Later we have a more free-wheeling chat about Eliot and his impact with Hannah Sullivan, who is a Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, and whose debut collection Three Poems was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2018.
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Sources
Gardner, Helen. “The Waste Land: Paris 1922.” The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, edited by Michael North, Norton Critical Edition, 1st ed., W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 72-89. Originally published in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of “The Waste Land“, 1973, pp. 67-94.
Ford, Mark. “Ezra Pound and the Drafts of The Waste Land.” British Library, 13 Dec 2016, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/ezra-pound-and-the-drafts-of-the-waste-land#.
McIntire, Gabrielle, editor. The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
North, Michael. “A Note on the Text.” The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, edited by Michael North, Norton Critical Edition, 1st ed., W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. xi – xiii.
Rainey, Lawrence. “The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land.” The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, edited by Michael North, Norton Critical Edition, 1st ed., W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 89-111. Originally published in T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, 1991, pp. 91-133.
Shaw, Fiona. “The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.” YouTube, uploaded by Vinícius Krupp, 12 July 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0Ic4P93O2o.
T. S. Eliot, The T. S. Eliot Estate and Faber & Faber, 2016. https://tseliot.com.