Eliot's The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a poem of about 430 lines in five sections by T. S. Eliot, an American-born poet living in London. It first appeared in October 1922 in Eliot's own journal The Criterion in London and a few days later, in the November issue, in The Dial in New York, and was published as a book, with the author's notes, in December 1922. It is made of fragments: shifting speakers, scenes from London, Greek myth, a tarot reading and passages in several languages.¹³

Eliot wrote it after the First World War and during a period of personal strain, partly while recovering in Margate and in Lausanne in 1921. The American poet Ezra Pound edited the manuscript heavily, cutting it to roughly half its length, and Eliot later dedicated the poem to him as the better craftsman, in a phrase borrowed from Dante. The poem draws on the Grail legend, anthropology, Dante, Shakespeare, Wagner and Hindu and Buddhist texts, and it has no clear plot. Its central image is a barren land that might be restored by rain, standing for a culture emptied of meaning.²⁴

Reaction was split at once. Some critics called it a hoax or incomprehensible, while others saw the voice of a generation. The Dial gave Eliot its yearly prize of 2,000 dollars. The poem taught later poets that a poem could be built from collage and allusion and that difficulty could be serious. Eliot went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. The lost drafts, with Pound's edits, were rediscovered in 1968 and published in 1971, showing how much the poem owed to the cutting.¹²