The Waste Land and Other Poems

by T. S. Eliot

Paperback, 1955

Status

Available

Call number

821.912

Collection

Publication

Harvest Books / Harcourt, Brace & World (1955), Paperback, 96 pages

Description

This volume includes the title poem as well as " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " " Gerontion, " " Ash Wednesday, " " Sweeney Among the Nightingales, " and other poems from Eliot's early and middle work. " Eliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English" (Edmund Wilson).

User reviews

LibraryThing member keylawk
The Waste Land refers to _____.

Published in 1921, just 2 years after the unreconciled death of his deeply Unitarian father, an emotional breakdown of both TS and his wife Vivian, and ending a writer's block that had silenced him for years, this poem is an assemblage of vignettes from Eliot's life
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in London. The poem is intense in the sense of psychologial nuance and ironic elegance. He fuses fairly diverse images into a skilfully rhythmic whole. While similar to such academic set pieces as Milton’s "Lycidas," The Waste Land is also like jazz -- syncopated, sometimes running parallel arpeggios of ideas, and in its post-War context, essentially iconoclastic. Eliot seems to indulge a horror of life, while immersing in it, so you come away with a sharp clearly cut sense of disillusionment. The "symbolist" influence of Arthur Symons, and even the daring of the Italian futurist Tamaso Marinetti, are projected. It intrudes.

My own response is that this is a kind of reaction to his bad marriage; making "art" out of those mad and mad-making conversations. I recall that Virginia Wolf, not unkindly, described TS as a poet who lived to scratch, and Vivian was his itch.
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LibraryThing member eilonwy_anne
I'm not a great poetry authority, but I found these somewhat disappointing. My other major reference point for Eliot is his Four Quartets, which I loved. Both works are dense with allusion and require some intellectual work to unlock, but Four Quartets felt (naturally) more mature, and rewarded me
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more than amply for my time and attention. Perhaps the comparison put it at an unfair disadvantage, but The Waste Land, while symbolically rich, beautifully atmospheric and linguistically clever, did not seem as meaningful or coherent. I felt it demanded much and yielded too little.

My favorite part was "What the Thunder Said", which had some beautifully resonant references and lasting images.
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LibraryThing member gbill
My understanding is that The Waste Land (1922) is a landmark in poetry and a very influential collection. Eliot assembled it in a Swiss sanitarium while recuperating from a nervous breakdown; among other things his marriage was deeply unhappy and beset by his wife’s many sicknesses.

Eliot writes
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like a jazz musician plays, coming at the reader from many lyrical angles and from a wealth of cultural, philosophical, and religious references. Unfortunately, I’m not a huge jazz fan, and I had the same thing feeling reading this as I do listening to jazz. I desperately wanted to like it, but was unable to fully appreciate it. There are some flashes of brilliance and this is undoubtedly writing that will elicit a wide variety of responses.

From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, my favorite from the collection:

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: -
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.


Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.


It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”


I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.


From Preludes:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.


From The Waste Land (III. The Fire Sermon)

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.


From The Hollow Men:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
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LibraryThing member ellevee
Eliot is one of the most casually devastating poets in history.

"This is the way the world ends."

His work gets more profound with each reading.
LibraryThing member elfortunawe
~~~On First Reading~~~

There's not much to be said about these poems on first reading. For the most part they're too cryptic to be properly understood right off the bat, with one exception being "Journey of the Magi".

"Journey of the Magi" is a monologue, assumedly from one of the famous Magi from
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the East who came looking for Jesus in the wake of a star. Basically (and I say this with a reserve of irony, since Eliot's poetry can hardly be described as basic) it concerns the effects, on one, of a religious experience.

The rest of the poems will have to wait on a second reading.
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LibraryThing member TheDivineOomba
This is my first serious volume of poetry I read that is not required by a class. And... I'm not sure what to think. I know the poetry is well written, but I didn't get it. I think I need to read this again.
LibraryThing member tloeffler
I like Eliot's work in general, and I was not aware that The Waste Land was a World War I poem, which gave it a different perspective than I had the first time I read it.
LibraryThing member regularguy5mb
I've always loved Eliot's style. His poems have this magnificent lyrical quality to them. Favorites from this collection include "The Hollow Men" and "Ash-Wednesday," and of course "The Waste Land."

I like that the editor included T.S. Eliot's original notes on "The Waste Land." It was nice to see.
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Also gave me some more books to add to my list, because if a master like Eliot finds inspiration in them...

The only thing I didn't like about this collection is the fact that it was not put together by Eliot himself, but someone collecting their personal favorites. Nothing overtly wrong with this, but I'd rather have a book that was arranged by Eliot from start to finish. This reads more like a "best of."
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LibraryThing member JudyCroome
8:16 pm 23 February 2015
The Waste Land and Other Poems - T.S. Eliot
I've read (and listened to) this collection of poems half a dozen times. THE WASTE LAND is, without a doubt, still my favourite. It's hard to understand, pompous at times and so dense with allusions to other works I lose track of
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what's Eliot's work and what isn't. And yet ... on some atavistic level this poem still "talks" to me. The rhythm, the magic, the sheer (dare I say it) poetry in the lines (April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land) draws a reader in and shakes up emotions I didn't even know I had.

The tension between the physical and the metaphysical is tremendous; Eliot clearly had a deep experience of how earthbound and limited we are by the very denseness of our bodies (...the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank), while the voice of our souls rush by unheard (The wind Crosses the brown land unheard). THE WASTE LAND is a mournful cry of a man trapped in a world of harsh reality (it was written only four years afer the devastation of Europe in World War 1), sensing there is something more (Madame Sosostris), yet unable to feel or perhaps believe in it (... this card, which is blank,...,which I am forbidden to see). Here, in this poem, is the struggle between the intellect and the emotions (fear death by water - in the Tarot the water cards represent emotion), good and evil and man's lower, sexual nature and his higher, Divine nature.

What a brilliant, depressing, strong poem it is!

So strong, it almost overshadows the other poems in this collection. But ASH WEDNESDAY, with its tone of sorrow and penitance already obvious from the title, is another powerful poem, as is JOURNEY OF THE MAGI and the remainder of the poems.

In its struggle between hope and despair, this collection is as relevant today as it was in Eliot's time and is worth the effort it takes to try and grasp its elusive meaning.
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LibraryThing member trilliams
It's not you, T.S. Eliot, it's me.
LibraryThing member ted_newell
A life changer that shows the hollowness of what we take for real. Symbols city. Through this to something far more.
LibraryThing member pathogenik
My favorite poem was 'What the thunder said' oh wow! I LOVED it, I swam and drowned in it :)
I gave it 4 and not 5 stars, because some passages were a bit dry, with dry non-poetic words. Some parts are way too amazing, though!!! I loved this book, really loved it!
LibraryThing member ragwaine
Though I've written some poetry and many songs I don't tend to read poetry and this collection reminded me why. It seems that poetry is a very personal thing and that often it is incomprehensible to anyone but the author, especially for those not willing to put in the extra effort. An example would
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be Shakespeare, but at least his words are often beautiful and tell a story.

For me, this collection was utterly devoid of anything redeeming. I didn't find a single line that I thought was intriguing, beautiful or even clever. I didn't connect with any of it. It was just so many words strung together and often coupled with nonsensical rhymes.

I do have one admission to make though. I picked up this collection as part of a reading challenge that required a book of poetry, but also because I mistakenly thought that "The Wasteland" was "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, which I had remembered enjoying at some point in the past.
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LibraryThing member P_S_Patrick
This is a short collection of poems of ten poems by TS Eliot, including his longer works "The Wasteland", "The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and "Ash Wednesday", as well as some shorter works.
Some of these (such as Prufrock and Landscapes) are transparent enough on the first read through.
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However "The Wasteland" requires a lot more work – the allusions, the references, the symbolism is all more dense and consistently obscure than that found in pretty much all poetry written before this. This is not to say however that we can't understand its general meaning quite well without having read it a dozen times, read a commentary on it, and listened to a couple of lectures (though you will probably want to), as its tone and imagery convey enough of its meaning without us getting every reference and allusion. And this is what makes it work as poetry – that it communicates exactly what it is trying to communicate without the reader completely and consciously understanding all of its content straight away – because it works on more than one level.
So what is the Wasteland about? It's about post-war London – about how horrible it is, like Dante's hell. It's about a fractured Europe which is compared to the body of Osiris chopped up and scattered around. It's about decay, the grubbiness and shabiness of things, and the parched wasteland of society waiting for renewal following World War I. The symbolism is variously religious, mythological, literary, operatic, contemporary, and exotic.
Aside from the depressing content of the Wasteland, its deliberate obscurity means that it lacks much of the immediate aesthetic appeal that entices many people to much poetry. However this is what Modernism is about – creating something new that doesn't always rely on the aesthetic appeal of orderly verse, attractive imagery, fine sentiment, and clarity – in the same way that modernism in painting broke the traditional rules of visual aesthetics. Eliot didn't invent modernism in poetry, but he does exemplify it. He uses different voices, mixes up symbolism and references from different cultures, with different meters, styles, themes and tones. This gives the poetry a cultural richness and a lot to get out of it, but this requires more of the reader, and for this reason Eliot won't appeal to many readers.
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LibraryThing member jonfaith
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

I first heard of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock while listening to a podcast of Entitled Opinions (thanks Tom) last winter. That podcast concerned Dante, however I found Eliot's images both vivid and modern. I then mentally shelved such for a future
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read. This present week appeared apt. While sorting through Marx and, then, Derrida on Marx and Shakespeare I found the prevailing winds favorable. Diving into such, I didn't care for the titular poem in the collection. The Waste Land and especially Eliot's notes for such strikes me as mere wanking. Oh well, verse isn't my métier, especially those alluding to the Grail. I did like Marina and Two Choruses from 'The Rock'

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City
Where the River flows, with foreign flotations.
There I was told: we have too many churches.
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LibraryThing member tldegray
I don't really know what to say about this except "read it." How do I review The Waste Land without writing a lengthy academic paper (which, btw, I have done)? It's a gorgeous poem, full of imagery and symbolism. Read it, then read it again.
LibraryThing member daizylee
Also includes Prufrock and "La Figlia Che Piange," one of my favorite poems.
LibraryThing member edwinbcn
Reading Stephen Spender's biography and critical introduction to the work of T. S. Eliot did not do anything to change my opinion about these poems. Reading them may be interesting but I do not care much for this intellectualism.

Just as in my student days, I still only really like "The Love Song of
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J. Alfred Prufock" but I did not like any of the other poems.
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Language

Original publication date

1922

Physical description

96 p.; 7.98 inches

ISBN

015694877X / 9780156948777
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