Then and Now

TLS September 20, 1923

The Waste Land

We look back to a review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by Edgell Rickword. Rickword was a poet, biographer of Rimbaud, and later the founding editor of Left Review. Go to www.the-tls.co.uk to see the review in full.

Between the emotion from which a poem rises and the reader there is always a cultural layer of more or less density from which the images or characters in which it is expressed may be drawn. In the ballad "I wish I were where Helen lies" this middle ground is but faintly indicated. The ballad, we say, is simpler than the "Ode to the Nightingale"; it evokes very directly an emotional response. In the ode the emotion gains resonance from the atmosphere of legendary association through which it passes before reaching us. It cannot be called better art, but it is certainly more sophisticated and to some minds less poignant. From time to time there appear poets and a poetic audience to whom this refractory haze of allusion must be very dense; without it the meanings of the words strike them so rapidly as to be inappreciable, just as, without the air, we could not detect the vibration of light. We may remember with what elaboration Addison, among others, was obliged to undertake the defence of the old ballads before it was recognized that their bare style might be admired by gentlemen familiar with the classics.

The poetic personality of Mr. Eliot is extremely sophisticated. His emotions hardly ever reach us without traversing a zig-zag of allusion. In the course of his four hundred lines he quotes from a score of authors and in three foreign languages, though his artistry has reached that point at which it knows the wisdom of sometimes concealing itself. There is in general in his work a disinclination to awake in us a direct emotional response. It is only, the reader feels, out of regard for some one else that he has been induced to mount the platform at all. From there he conducts a magic-lantern show; but being too reserved to expose in public the impressions stamped on his own soul by the journey through the Waste Land, he employs the slides made by others, indicating with a touch the difference between his reaction and theirs. So the familiar stanza of Goldsmith becomes

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

To help us to elucidate the poem Mr. Eliot has provided some notes which will be of more interest to the pedantic than the poetic critic. Certainly they warn us to be prepared to recognize some references to vegetation ceremonies. This is the cultural or middle layer, which, whilst it helps us to perceive the underlying emotion, is of no poetic value in itself. We desire to touch the inspiration itself, and if the apparatus of reserve is too strongly constructed, it will defeat the poet's end. The theme is announced frankly enough in the title, "The Waste Land"; and in the concluding confession,

These fragments I have shored against my ruins,

we receive a direct communication which throws light on much which had preceded it.

From the opening part, "The Burial of the Dead," to the final one we seem to see a world, or a mind, in disaster and mocking it: despair. We are aware of the toppling of asp rations, the swift disintegration of accepted stability, the crash of an ideal. Set at a distance by a poetic method which is reticence itself, we can only judge of the strength of the emotion by the visible violence of the reaction. Here is Mr. Eliot, a dandy of the choicest phrase, permitting himself  blatancies like "the young man carbuncular." Here is a poet capable of a style more refined than that of any of his generation parodying without taste or skill - and of this the example from Goldsmith is not the most astonishing ....

TLS JUNE 5 2009