UNPUBLISHED EDITED VOLUME

A Companion to The Waste Land

Proposal

John Xiros Cooper

15 November 2011

Overview

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is the most famous poem

of the twentieth century. Despite the many

difficulties of a text that is both recondite and

elusive, it became a popular work of literature and

continues to attract readers well beyond academic

precincts. Eliot himself has been central to

literary culture in the English-speaking world for

almost one hundred years now and his presence as a

significant canonic figure seems destined to

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continue for the foreseeable future.

Notwithstanding his fame and popularity, Eliot has

not always been admired as a writer, thinker, and

moralist. From his first appearance in literary

London in 1915, he has provoked both admiration and

disdain, devotion and abhorrence, and that

difference of opinion has deepened and widened over

the decades. Yet, at no time has he disappeared

from view. Although his reputation has occasionally

been blackened, his stature as the leading poet of

the century challenged, his political ideas

derided, he remains a remarkably resilient

reputation who still has the power to engage and to

startle new generations of readers.

The fate of Eliot’s literary reputation and

stature is comparable to the fate of his most

famous poem. It, too, has persisted as a notable

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achievement, still in print, still studied in

lecture halls and seminar rooms around the world,

and still, if the shelves of a reasonably well

stocked library are anything to go by, the fruitful

source of much analysis, comment, and

interpretation. But like Eliot himself, it has

been a text that has created much controversy as to

its merits even as its position as a canonic work

was being inscribed in the curriculum of the modern

imagination. The poem is notoriously difficult,

elusive, learned, obscure, uncompromising in the

challenges it offers to understanding, yet it is

also haunting, moody, evocative, musical, and,

above all, unforgettable. There have been many

attempts at interpretation, some perhaps more

successful than others, but the meaning and

influence of The Waste Land as a literary text has

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never been exhausted. It remains a work with which

each reader must come to terms. The existing

critical literature about the poem may help no

doubt in tracking down allusions, quotations,

historical events and personages, but these alone

cannot settle the poem comfortably in a reader’s

mind. Each reader must come to his or her own

understanding of the poem by way of analysis,

knowledge, and insight.

It is in helping the individual reader come to

terms with the poem that this book may be of use.

The Companion to The Waste Land provides essays that

engage with the history of the text, the process of

its composition, the events surrounding its

publication, its initial reception as a text of its

time, the place of the poem in the context Eliot’s

other work, the text as a historical document,

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problems of its formal organization, imaginative

sources, the text’s literary references, the

anthropology on which the poem is based, its

philosophical implications, its startling

engagements with sexuality, gender, transgender,

and queerness, and, finally, the poem’s

canonization in the academy after the 1920s.

Before proceeding with a description of the

book’s contents, I would like to set out some

parameters and clarifications. I presume that a

‘companion’ aims to attract a wide readership of

senior undergraduate students, postgraduates, and

other interested readers rather than a small group

of academic specialists and researchers, although

it may be of use to that narrower group of readers

as well. However, the specialist in Eliot

scholarship is not the primary target audience. The

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topics stressed in the following chapter-by-chapter

synopsis have been chosen with a view to helping

the relative newcomer to the text. Some experience

of literary history, literary critical practices,

and modernist literature is assumed, but certainly

not to the level one might expect of specialist

readers. Moreover, the editorial task of a

companion such as this should not aim at advancing

the personal theses dear to the editor’s heart. If

that were the editor’s aim it would be far better

to compose a monograph rather than try to bring

together a team of contributors and then compel

them to do the editor’s critico-theoretical

bidding. We do well to remember the old saw about

the difficulties of herding wild cats. It is true

of course that no editor is entirely transparent

and disinterested in the enterprise. Certainly, an

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editor’s sense of which topics and issues are

germane will colour the character of the finished

product. But does this mean that individual

contributions will not be permitted to pursue lines

of enquiry that diverge, more or less, from what

the editor may have written on any one particular

subject? A book of essays written by a number of

perfectly competent contributors ought to resemble

a political democracy rather than one-man rule,

even if that man happens to be graciously

benevolent.

Let me also say that this book is not a

companion to T. S. Eliot in general. There are a

number of admirable companions and guides to the

poet covering all aspects of his life and work

already in print. The spotlight here is on a single

poem. Some of the critical debates that engage

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Eliot scholars and critics more generally may come

into play when they relate to specific aspects of

The Waste Land, but they cannot be the primary

concern of individual chapters. Compelling matters

such as Eliot’s conservative politics, more obvious

in his life and work after the Waste Land period,

his post-Waste Land conversion to Anglo-Catholicism,

and his alleged anti-Semitism may be the focus of

recent debates about Eliot in general, but do they

bulk large in coming to terms with the poem? To the

extent that they do, they can be addressed in the

context of matters that relate more specifically to

the poem itself. These are points of interest that

may come more fully into focus after a student or

reader has become sufficiently familiar with and

attracted to Eliot’s work to warrant further, more

advanced, study.

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The book is organized in four major sections

with individual chapters in each section:

• Composition and Collaboration,

Publication, Sources

• Forms of Performance, Music, Images

• Meanings, Space/Time/Self, Queerness

• Reception, Canonization, Influence

Each section will have several chapters that will

provide readers with the textual, interpretative,

and historical information necessary to engage with

Eliot’s poem. My introduction, ‘Reading The Waste

Land (out loud)’ will summarize some of the

problems of reading the poem and emphasize the need

to hear the poem as dramatic speech not just words

lying passively on the page. Hearing the words

spoken aloud offers one of the keys, perhaps the

most important first step, to understanding the

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various moods, musicality, and performative

dimension of the poem. This emphasis is in keeping

with recent recordings, YouTube video clips, and

other digital versions, including an iPad

application, that have brought the poem to a wider

audience in recent years. The introduction will

also provide an overview of the Companion as a

whole and the issues that are taken up in greater

detail in the following chapters.

Section 1

Chapter 1: Composition and Collaboration

The first chapter in section 1 of the Companion

will tackle the knotty history of the composition

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of the poem. It will survey the process by which

the many fragments Eliot worked on over a long

period of time were pulled together in the summer

of 1921 as ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’.

This first chapter will also relate the

compositional struggle with elements of Eliot’s

personal life that were in play as he worked on the

first drafts. He did at a later time link the poem

to his own biography, calling it a ‘personal grouse

against life’ rather than a text making a socio-

cultural diagnosis of a failed civilization. This

chapter also addresses the issue of Eliot’s

editorial collaboration with Ezra Pound in the

making of the final draft of a poem now called ‘The

Waste Land’. It will look at the way the two men

interacted in working with Eliot’s original draft

and the sort of suggestions made by Pound. This

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chapter will also look at the poetics of obscurity:

did Pound help shape a mass of confused notes and

thereby clarified the poem’s themes or did his

editorial suggestions make the poem more obscure

and difficult?

Chapter 2: Publication

This chapter will tell the complicated story of the

poem’s early publication history, from its initial

appearances in the Criterion (October) and the Dial

(November) in 1922 to its appearance in Eliot’s

first Collected Poems in 1925 after he had joined the

firm of Faber and Gwyer. The negotiations and

events surrounding the edition published by Horace

Liveright in the United States and the first

British edition published by Virginia and Leonard

Woolf will also be examined.

Chapter 3: Sources

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This chapter will examine Eliot’s reliance on a

number of literary and other sources. What are

they and how have they been used? The Waste Land has

been called, famously, ‘a quoting poem’, and that

its reliance on the literature, philosophy, art,

and music of the past is both a symptom of an

exhausted imagination and a work of brilliant

bricolage. Eliot’s educational experiences as a

student of literature, philosophy, religion, and

anthropology provided him with the knowledge for

his many borrowings. His sources as a result are

eclectic, transnational, and range across the arts

from literature, painting, sculpture, and music.

But perhaps most importantly they translate into a

work of art the precepts of his theory of tradition

as formulated in the contemporaneous essay,

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.

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Section 2

Chapter 4: Forms of Performance

Eliot’s poetics of appropriation was not limited to

specific textual borrowings, the poem also

appropriates a number of different literary forms

and modes; these include satire, lyric, epic,

dramatic monologue, and pastiche, but above all,

the symbolism of the French poets that Eliot

admired as a student and later as a critic,

primarily Baudelaire, Laforgue, and Mallarmé. But

recent theories of the performative (Butler et al)

have opened up new ways of understanding the poem.

The poem is clearly a hybrid in terms of dramatic

speech; it deploys a number of speech genres,

including a form of soliloquy, dialogue, interior

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monologue, and ventriloquism, in short, it is

pervaded by the performative.

Chapter 5: Music

Throughout Eliot’s creative work music recurs again

and again; it flows as a constant undercurrent. The

presence of Richard Wagner in the poem is not only

a source and influence but makes discernible

Eliot’s ‘musicating imagination’, to quote Marjorie

Perloff. The Waste Land’s debt to music goes much

further than references to this or that composer or

musical tradition, it informs Eliot’s creative

ethos. His comment that ‘Poetry begins, I dare say,

with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it

retains that essential of percussion and rhythm’ in

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism testifies to the

importance of music in his work in general and the

poem in particular. This chapter will not only

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examine music as a point of reference but the

musicality of the poem itself, especially Eliot’s

experiments with prosody and versification, a topic

not often broached in studies of The Waste Land. This

aspect will dovetail with the previous chapter’s

discussion of performance.

Chapter 6: Images

A third aspect of the poem’s aesthetic interests

lies in the nature and status of its images and how

they may or may not function as symbols. Eliot’s

technical innovations in his use of visual and

other sensory imagery are related to some of his

philosophical studies and to contemporary

developments in the visual arts. This chapter will

look at the relationship between The Waste Land and

two contemporary movements in literature and art,

Imagism and Vorticism. There are clear connections

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to the movement known as Imagism and to T. E.

Hulme’s ideas of the Image and of a new

‘classicism’ for modernity. Is The Waste Land the

kind of ‘classical’ work that Hulme and Pound

favoured? Does the poem conform in any way to the

movement in art known as Vorticism that was

propounded in Blast and in Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A

Memoir.

Section 3

Chapter 7: Meanings

What is the poem about? What have been some of the

ways in which the poem’s meanings have been read?

Its themes have been the source of much controversy

from the beginning. This chapter will identify the

principle thematic materials that have been

proposed as providing the poem with one level of

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unity, such as the imagery of sterility in nature

and in society, the religious rituals that lie

hidden in medieval Grail romances (Jessie Weston),

the anatomizing of modern melancholy, the modern

city, sexual failure, violence, the context of the

First World War, the limits of language, and the

horror at the core of modernity.

Chapter 8: Space/Time/Self

This chapter examines more closely three aspects of

the poem’s radical modernity, aspects that make it

relevant to the twenty-first century. The poem’s

‘cubist’ geography resonates with recent

theoretical and empirical investigations of space,

the transnational, and the cosmopolitan

imagination. The plasticity of space is paralleled

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by the poem’s variegated temporalities. Eliot’s

rendering of time brings to light what decades

later would inform debates about postmodernity.

Space and time in the poem are no longer understood

as foundational Kantian categories, but as

contestable domains. Their malleability is extended

to the reconfiguring of the self. It is no longer

conceived as the given category of personal

identity but as a post-psychological artifact

composed not as a ghostly emanation of the

unconscious but as an editorial project, a radical

form of self-fashioning that has more in common

with a Picasso portrait than with the Romantic

paradigm of self-development.

Chapter 9: Queerness

The Waste Land is a queer text in more ways than one.

Queerness is usually applied to concepts and

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theories of gender and gender transition and the

poem is deeply involved with issues of gender,

gender bending, and gender mobility, but the poem

is also queer in a number of other ways as well.

This chapter will expand the concept of queerness

in order to understand an aspect of the poem of

particular relevance today, namely the permeability

of gender boundaries and the precariousness of

normative sexual assignments.

Section 4

Chapter 10: Reception

Right from the start The Waste Land provoked strong

reactions. This chapter will examine the

controversies surrounding the poem in the 1920s.

It will look at the similarities and differences in

the reception of the poem in Britain and the United

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States. As one of the definitive texts of

modernism, the poem was both embraced and reviled

by poets and critics who saw the poem as the

terrain on which contrasting views of modernism

were contested. There had been arguments about the

nature and course of modernism up to 1922, most

famously in Britain in the conflict between

Futurism and Vorticism, but it was the publication

of The Waste Land that gave a point and focus to the

debates about the modern all through the 1920s.

Chapter 11: Canonization

This chapter will look at the relationship between

The Waste Land and the emergence of the two most

authoritative critical currents in the 1930s, the

‘practical criticism’ of I. A Richards, the poetics

of close reading we associate with the name of F.

R. Leavis, and the ‘new criticism’ of the American

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academy, Cleanth Brooks et al. The poem provided a

test case for the advance of these critical

procedures during their establishment as the new

critical orthodoxies of the Anglo-American English

department.

Chapter 12: Influence

This chapter will assess the influence of the poem

on twentieth-century culture in Britain, the United

States, India, and other parts of the English-

speaking world. It will look at the way the poem’s

technical innovations were absorbed by later

generations of poets and how its formal strategies

became a kind of poetic template for the future. It

will also look at the objections and rejections of

the poem as an exemplar in the various anti-

modernist movements of the 1940s and 1950s. The

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chapter will also assess the continuing importance

of the poem for late twentieth-century poetries

written in English and in other languages. Finally,

the poem’s presence in popular culture as a

definitive ‘moment’ in the making of modern

sensibilities will also be surveyed.

Bibliography

The book will conclude with a critical bibliography

on work on the poem.

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