Abstract
Reading the notes Eliot added as closely as the verses, this chapter reveals the satire present and at work in The Waste Land, a poem renowned for its allusiveness, indirectness, and difficulty. The reader, aware of the satire, works to make the connections that the wastelanders fail to make. In fact, they, and the speaking voice who represents them, stand exposed as variously incapable. Simply put, they desire and seek the wrong thing, including painless relief, escape, and death, instead of the purifying fire available in, through, and by means of the very waste land they inhabit.
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Notes
Qtd. in B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 26.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 27.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 44.
From Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land.
As Southam discovered, this note is replete with inaccuracy, with bits of “mock-bibliographical detail which [Eliot] picked up from his own ‘London Letter’ in The Dial, May 1921, when casting around for material to bulk out the notes” (27). The quotation from The Sacred Wood is from page 48.
T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, St.-J. Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 8.
Eliot, preface, Anabasis.
See my Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
T.S. Eliot, “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 476.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 347–48; “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 287.
T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial, n.s. (Fall 1959), 153–58 (originally published in The Dial, November 1923).
T.S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 86n.
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© 2013 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2013). Voices Hollow and Plaintive, Unattended and Peregrine: Hints and Guesses in The Waste Land. In: T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364692_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364692_5
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