Waste Not Want Not

            Thomas Stearns Eliot, better known as T. S. Eliot to those who read his poems, is an American poet of British descent. He was the first of his family to return to London after his ancestor, Andrew Eliot, immigrated from East Coker, England to colonial Massachusetts in 1668. Andrew Eliot built a life for himself and served as a judge during the ever famous Salem Witch Trials, along with an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, sentencing nineteen women to death by hanging during the Trials. Moving through the generations to Eliot’s grandfather, Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot became a very successful man himself by starting up a school, serving in the military on the Union side during the civil war and eventually moving from Massachusetts to St. Louis, Missouri in 1834, where T. S. Eliot was eventually born. He grew up under a Puritanical upbringing, which prevented him from experiencing much of what young boys typically would in childhood. Eliot described his childhood to William Turner Levy, who knew Eliot during the last thirteen years of his life, “As a child, all that concerned my family was ‘right and wrong’ and what was ‘done and not done’,” (Miller 18). He received a great deal of influence from his mother. His mother, “Charlotte Eliot was in a position to shape him after her own desires, transferring to the young Tom, not only her love of literature, but also her own thwarted desire to become a recognized poet,” (Miller 21). Eliot’s father never approved of his drive throughout his youth and later life to become a writer. His father died without them ever reconciling this.

            Thomas grew up under an odd set of circumstances as a child. Both of his parents were forty-five when Eliot was born. He was the youngest of seven children, where the closest sibling, his brother Henry, was nine years older than him. He had four sisters which were all more than eleven years older than him. He spent most of his childhood as the family baby, and was often dressed up, when he was three and four years old, by his sisters as a girl. There are archival photographs of Eliot at this age. As mentioned before, Charlotte Eliot, his mother, made sure that Eliot received a thorough literary education beyond what the schools of their frontier town offered. She made sure he studied plenty of Shakespeare, which Eliot admitted he greatly dislike when older—he preferred the writings of authors such as Mark Twain, where the main characters were rebellious (Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer). Eliot never went to a public school. He spent his early educational years at Mrs. Lockwood’s School in Missouri. He then spent seven years, from age ten to seventeen, at the school his grandfather established, Smith Academy. Eliot always said he remembered those years fondly. After graduating, Eliot spent one year at Milton Academy in Massachusetts before transferring to Harvard, where he enrolled in 1906. He spent time at Oxford in London for a fellowship he received through Harvard, and fell in love with England again in the process. He secured his British citizenship in 1927 and lived out most of his life in London.

            Eliot had two wives. He married his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood on June 26, 1915. It was during this time that his good friend Ezra Pound was attempting to help Eliot reconcile with his father over his career choice. Ezra wrote, “No one in London cares a hang what is written in America” (Menand 98) attempting to make a point of how people were recognizing Eliot’s work. He followed up later in the letter saying that “London is the only possible place for him to exist,” (Menand 98). He spoke of London loving to discover its own gods and how Eliot was quickly becoming one. Unfortunately, this letter did nothing to sway Eliot’s father and he died in 1919, still disapproving of his son. This led T. S. Eliot into a time period of extreme depression. He wrote many poems during this period of his life that never saw the light of day until after his death in 1965. He sought counseling and went through psychotherapy during the time period he wrote The Waste Land (Trosman 1974). With the death of his father and his new marriage, he turned the majority of his attention to his writing. Over the next decade this drove his first wife into depression herself, and they separated in 1932. His second wife, Valerie Fletcher, inherited all of his properties upon Eliot’s death and went about selectively publishing poems which he had kept in a leather bound notebook. This notebook was started in 1909, as known from a letter Eliot himself wrote to his benefactor John Quinn, who was interested in helping to publish The Waste Land at the time of his request for Eliot’s early poems. Eliot sold his notebook to Quinn for $140 (approximately £29 at the time). T. S. Eliot described his notebook as something “in which I entered all my work of that time as I wrote it, so that’s the only original manuscript. […] You will find a great many sets of verse which will have never been printed and which I am sure you will agree never ought be printed,” (Eliot 1998, xii). Eliot never intended these poems to be printed, he expressly said later in the letter that Quinn “keep them to [him]self and see they are never printed,” (Eliot 1998, xii). Many of these poems were thought to be potential outlines for The Waste Land and were published by Valerie Eliot in a 1971 collection titled The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. She also published his other poems in various collections which have been reprinted a number of times over the years.

            When asked in a 1959 interview of how Eliot seemed to write his poems in scattered sections and whether they began as separate poems, he answered, “That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them,” (Elliot 1998, xiii). Many believed that this may have been how he wrote The Waste Land, and their hypothesis would be half true. Eliot pulled some lines from poems he never published and wrote unique sequences that only appeared in the early drafts of the poem itself. It is relatively well known that Ezra Pound had a heavy hand in crafting the final version which went to print in 1922. Upon release of the original drafts with Pound’s notations, many were interested to read the longer version of Eliot’s poem. It resulted in a better understanding of the story behind the poem as Ezra went about cutting most of the transitions out of the final draft, making the poem on a whole, feel disjointed in places. When his poem was release and initial criticism was printed about Eliot’s poem, many asked him about where it was his intention to criticize the state of the world in his poem. Eliot replied, “To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmic grumbling,” (Miller xi). It is quite possible that Eliot’s poem was simply interpreted by his audience with a greater significance than he meant for it.

            For those who read The Waste Land, it can be incredibly difficult to follow. In the original review of The Waste Land published in Dial magazine in December 1922 by Edmund Wilson Jr., Wilson described some of the references in Eliot’s poem: “Vedic Hymns, Buddha, the Psalms, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Luke, Sappho, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, the Pervigilium Veneris, St Augustine, Dante, the Grail Legends, early English poetry, Kyd, Spenser, Shakespeare, John Day, Webster, Middleton, Milton, Goldsmith, Gérard de Nerval. Froude, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Swinburne, Wagner, The Golden Bough, Miss Weston's book, various popular ballads, and the author's own earlier poems,” (Wilson 1922). And those were just the ones Wilson identified! There are further references as outlined by the footnotes. Wilson believed the title: The Waste Land was derived from the book by Miss Jessie L. Western called From Ritual to Romance, which is the story of an impotent king who rules over a literal waste land which has been plagued by famine and animals which refuse to reproduce. This is a version of the Grail quest. Ultimately, Wilson praises Eliot saying, “Mr. Eliot, with all his limitations, is one of our authentic poets,” (Wilson 1922). But he still acknowledges the depth of Eliot’s work saying The Waste Land “not only recapitulates all his earlier and already familiar motifs, but it sounds for the first time in all their intensity, untempered by irony or disguise, the hunger for beauty and the anguish of living which lie at the bottom of all his work,” (Wilson 1922). Wilson states that Eliot’s depression and yearning for the good of the world is so clearly present in his work that it ends up representing the modern era so perfectly by holding onto that last speck of hope in all of the dried wastes of the world. In the seemingly apocalyptic time of war and destruction wrought upon Europe with the first and second World Wars, the Victorians needed to hold onto that hope of life improving after everything they knew ended.

            Opinions following the initial reading seem to evenly disagree with each other. The reader will have one of three possible responses to The Waste Land: either they will love it, hate it, or put the book down and leave because they could not bring themselves to understand the nonsense they were reading. Leaving aside the wholly confused audience, both those who love the poem and those who hate the poem agree that it is a successful representation of the Modern Era. Modern writers tend to be conflicting in their works because “modernist literature holds many funds of irony to mock its own prescriptions,” (Menand 113), for much of what occurred during this period may have been too much to take if there was not a sufficient amount of mocking and making fun of the terrible fate the early 20th century had left. The Waste Land followed the end of World War I, and Europe was still dealing with the aftermath of the destroyed families and broken countries. There was a constant fear of how simply everything could fall apart. Eliot’s second verse strikes fear with a simply series of words, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” (Eliot 2531). Everything fades with time. Empires crumble, towers fall, and everything dies. Immortality is a false sense and staring at the dust of time gone by makes real the future of all living things. It makes life seem futile to a certain extent. Will any of what is done today affect the world a decade from now? A hundred years from now? A thousand years from now? For most the answer is no, and many are contented with this simple way of living. But there are the ambitious, who fear the setting sun and seek to quench the thirst for remembrance into the future. Wilson said in his review that “Eliot hears in his own parched cry the voices of all the thirsty men of the past.” Eliot was eventually asked if it was his intention to write The Waste Land as “the disillusionment of a generation,” (Scofield 133). He said that he could not apply the word ‘intention’ to any of his poems or any poem ever written. Doing so would attempt to find a specific reason for the poem to have been written and eliminate the possibility of blind and immediate expression, such as what most poems were during the Romantic Era.

            Modernism has moved on from the fanciful expression of the Romantics. Eliot brings up his “unreal city” (Eliot 2532, 2536) twice, describing it first in the morning and then at noon. The end of the poem deals with the approaching storm and the thunder speaking loudly across the land. The Unreal City appears to describe London, but a bewitched version. Eliot’s poem “takes place half in the real world—the world of contemporary London, and half in a haunted Wilderness—The Waste Land of mediaeval legend; but the Waste Land is only the hero’s arid soul and the intolerable world about him,” (Wilson 1922). Everyone is the hero, or villain, of their own story. There are times when it may seem the world is out to get you in a general sense. Eliot’s poem possesses a high level of anonymity and describes the various states of being as being applicable to anyone. Everyone can feel temptation, “Come under the shadow of this red rock” (Eliot 2531); uncertainty, “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” (Eliot 2534); lust, for power or beauty as in Eliot’s description of Cleopatra (2533); or fear, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” (Eliot 2531). Loneliness can easily be all consuming and crushing to anyone. No one would want to be left behind in an unmarked grave “and bones cast in a little low dry garret,/rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year,” (Eliot 2536). This was a common concern following the wars of the early 20th century. There were so many bodies that people did not know what soul belonged to them. As with most European tradition, families felt a great wrongness leaving their loved ones to rot in an unknown place, burying empty caskets to leave a place to remember those lost to the tides of time and strife. Irony played a grand role in the wars of the early 20th century leading generations to their deaths after their predecessors had worked so hard to make a world that was relatively peaceful to live in. The better world of the Victorian Era, which sought to survive the Modern Era, was obliterated by their own intentions to preserve that way of living.

            Not everyone interprets this poem is such a literal sense by linking it to the time period. Some choose to focus on the religious standpoints taken or the gender of the characters described. Concerning gender, there is a certain ambiguity in whether most of the characters are male or female due to the gender indifference of the English personal pronouns, “I” or “you” which do nothing to identify gender differences. As a result, gender is determined via other words, such as “she” in “the Chair she sat in,” (Eliot 2533), or through tone of voice. The issue with tone of voice being an identifier of gender of the characters is that connotations surrounding that determination change as time progresses and world views of what defines male and female alters. Cyrena Pondrom believes that the gender determination and “performativity” of gender in The Waste Land was greatly influenced by Eliot’s personal life, namely the women he had intimate relations with. It is impossible for an author to not be influenced by their lives when writing, so disputing against this theory proves difficult. He could have done one of two things: project his feelings for these women into various versions and drafts of The Waste Land or he could have described famous historical figures that he may have admired in some way and wished to portray them in his writings. There is support for his historical fascination due to the sheer number of historical references made throughout the rest of the poem. Taking a purely feminist stance towards this particular piece may not prove to be successfully interpretive of what Eliot may have been thinking when the verse was written due to the social turmoil of the time. But, as learned from Eliot’s home life, he was often rebellious and actively thought differently than the average person of his time would, so dismissal of Eliot’s curiosities towards how women were viewed cannot be fully dismissed. These verses are his own “rhythmic grumbling” (Miller xi).

            Religion is another major topic that is included in The Waste Land, primarily because Eliot references so many from all over the world including Buddhism, Christianity and the Grail Legend, Tarot Cards, and Islam. Being an artist, he often chooses to use the more dramatic, fantastical, or mysterious features of these religions and often blends them together. A good example of this is when he mixes “burning burning burning burning,” (Eliot 2539) from Buddha’s Fire Sermon with “O Lord Thou pluckest me out,” (Eliot 2539) from St. Augustine’s Confessions. The lines immediately follow each other and could be interpreted together quite well, despite their difference in origin. His use of various s religions may have something to do with the ending of The Waste Land where Eliot says, “Shantih Shantih Shantih,” (2543) which translates into “The Peace which passeth understanding.” He very likely meant this to be a final statement to prove that it does not matter what you believe as long as there is a universal understanding. When people understand each other, there is peace, just as the line translates. This may have been chosen because it accurately represents Eliot’s feelings at the conclusion of this work. He, himself, may have felt a greater worldly understanding of the differences of people, and still appreciate those different views of the world while maintaining his own. Surette suggests that Eliot’s fascination and use of some of the religious elements, such as the Grail legend and the tarot cards, which have been fundamentally lost to the tides of time but still managed to survive into the modern day without maintaining their original meaning, “provided a framework that was a factitious as the Odyssey was for Joyce’s Ulysses,” (Surette 274). Much of Eliot’s story was left up to artistic interpretation.

            Imagery of The Waste Land, itself plays a crucial role is describing the fantastical world that Eliot has created as his “haunted Wilderness.” It is within the first section “The Burial of the Dead” which provides the crucial imagery such as “the rocky, deserted land, the absence of life-giving water, the dead or dying vegetation,” (Lewis 2007). Much of this imagery is believed to have been taken from biblical references such as the books of Ezekiel or Ecclesiastes. But the imagery was also influenced by Dante, “I had not thought death had undone so many./ Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled/ And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,” (Eliot 2532) and Shakespeare, “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” (Eliot 2531). Much of the imagery that Eliot conveys can also be seen in the chosen languages that some of the lines are depicted in. Each language provides a different way to process information and experience the world. As a result, what language a person speaks can affect their entire outlook on life and their world view. Learning to speak and understand multiple languages expands one’s world view and experience and increases their personal understanding towards others. The language of the verse also affects the voice of the passage. Each language carries certain normalized intonations and tones that are expected to be spoken when reading various passages aloud, such as a slightly angry tone from the German or a more romantic feel from the French.

            There is no expected response to Eliot’s The Waste Land. His 1922 reviewer, Wilson, noted that “it is sure to be objected that Eliot has written a puzzle rather than a poem and that his work can possess no higher interest than a full rigged ship in a bottle.” The reader is free to take any interpretation of this poem they chose. Many will have a difficult time understanding it and many will disagree on their opinion of the final result. What Eliot left behind in The Waste Land is a unique view of historical precedence and the time period to which the poem and its author belong. Eliot was called arrogant by several classmates, but it is difficult to agree that this was an inherent part of his character. When Eliot was instructed to stop smoking by his doctor in the 50s, he used candy as a substitute for his cigarettes. He confided in his friend Levy that he always wanted to buy candy when he was a boy, but even though he had the money to do so, his Puritanical upbringing prevented him from actually entering the store and purchasing something that was meant to satisfy his personal desires (Miller 18). Such a story does not carry the sense of egoism, but it very well may have been a feature of his personality that Eliot struggled with later in life after he found his fame. It is difficult to not let adoration go to your head and let the occasional insanity it brings sink in. Such things are a puzzle for a later date. For now, it is prudent to watch the ship in a bottle and see which wind its sails may catch. A hell on Earth is born every day and the features of the Waste Land change as time creeps steadily forward. I wonder what will be next.

Bibliography

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Waste Land.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. W. W. Norton Company, Inc., 2012. Print.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns ed. Christopher Ricks. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998. Print.

Lewis, Pericles. Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 2007. 129-151. Print.

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Miller Jr, James E. T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922. Penn State Press, 2005. Print.

Pondrom, Cyrena N. “T. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land.”

Modernism/Modernity 12.3 (2005): 425-441. Print.

Scofield, Martin. T. S. Eliot: The Poems. Cambridge University Press, 1988. Print.

Surrette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 1993. Print.

Trosman, Harry. “T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land: Psychopathological Antecedents and

Transformations.” Archives of General Psychiatry 30.5 (1974): 709-717. Print.

Wilson, Edmund, Jr. “The Poetry of Drouth.” The Dial. New York, 73.6 (December 1922): 611-16. Print.