If you're not confused, you're not paying attention

"The Waste Land" is probably the most influential poem of the twentieth century, and was almost immediately a text with which poets and writers throughout the English-speaking world had to contend. Yet for all its influence "WL" is not an easily accessed poem--as Aaron amply demonstrated this morning, it takes ten years of reading and research to piece together even the stories to which Eliot is referring, to say nothing of making sense of this mishmash of allusions and the complex philosophical evaluation of the modern world which it betokens.

Put simply: if "The Waste Land" makes sense to you, you're not trying hard enough.

Alternatively, you've lost your mind.

No, seriously: Eliot began writing "The Waste Land" in a European sanitorium. Eliot's mental life was never pleasant for him, but much of the work he produced before his conversion to Anglicanism in the 1930s was the particular result of what he saw as the maddening effect of a postchristian world. One of the better fictionalized takes on "The Waste Land" is Pat Barker's 1991 Regeneration, in which characters from "The Waste Land" and fictional representations of contemporary poets mingle in an asylum in England in the middle of WWI.

It is easy to be caught up in "WL"--it is one of the deepest and greatest verse works our language has produced. Aaron and I and many of our colleagues in the English graduate program wound up here partly because we fell in love with T. S. Eliot in early survey courses in college. I'm hoping that some of you are having similar experiences this week--well, not in the sense that you all wind up going to grad school, but in the sense that you are finding something real and powerful in the poems we're reading this week.

You don't have to look up every reference Eliot makes in "WL" to appreciate its depth: I hope you've read through the poem two or three times already, and that you continue to reread it over the coming weeks. "WL" rewards multiple readings, and in particular rewards sensitivity to its details and to its structure.

If you find yourself taken by the allusions in "WL" and want to pursue them a little further--say, into at least the first essay--you might consider picking up an edition of the poem that tries to collapse these years of research into footnotes and excerpts of the texts to which Eliot refers. The best edition out there right now is the Michael North edited Norton Critical (call no. PS3509 L43 W3 2001--there's a copy still in Memorial Library, and you can request it from other UW System Libraries), which quotes extensively from the Weston From Ritual to Romance and the other sources to which Aaron referred (Petronius, Ovid, Dante, Buddha, etc.).

Don't want to make the trek to the library? There is a strong online resource available to you in the form of the Modern American Poetry pages on T. S. Eliot at the Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They have a thorough biography and timeline, but the real treasure is there pages summarizing critical responses to his work--they quote the major literary scholars on "The Waste Land" and The Love Song. "WL" devotees might want to read critics' evaluations of the composition of "The Waste Land", which we might discuss briefly in class on Friday.

Want more depth than some well-chosen critical blurbs? You can read a more detailed take on Eliot's biography via the lengthy literary biography put together by Contemporary Authors or his even lengthier entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

But, remember, all this biography is only as valuable as the sensitivity you bring to your reading of the poem: all the detailed allusive identification in the world is for naught if you're not paying attention to the tone and the sheer poetry of the work.