It was a lowly subeditor for an afternoon tabloid who devised the headline ‘World’s Greatest Poem’. ¹

Whether any work could ever merit such laurels, the banner was not untypical of the feverish response that this particular poem would receive. Published in 1922, four years after the end of the Great War, The Waste Land has become surely the most iconoclastic work of poetry of the past one hundred years. It is also one of the most enduringly popular. Studied by schoolchildren and university students, and cherished by countless general readers, it is a poem that has captivated our imaginations for a century. But it is also a poem that has perplexed even the most sophisticated literary minds. W. B. Yeats told Eliot at the time: ‘I find The Waste Land very beautiful, but here and there are passages I do not understand.’² And while Virginia Woolf marvelled at its musicality, after Eliot recited it to her in 1921, she confided in her diary, ‘What connects it together, I’m not so sure.’³

The poem is famous – or should that be infamous? – for its fragmentary style and voices. It has been said to reflect a lack of ethical certainty that abounded in the years after the Great War. It has been said to reflect sexual relations and spirituality, mythology and moral decay; it has been said to strive for meaning in a meaningless era. It has been said to be about homosexuality, it has been said to be about heterosexuality; it has been said to explore death and to explore rebirth. It has been described as among the most truthful poems of the age; it has been labelled a masterful fake.

Eliot himself dismissed many of the associations that came to overlay the poem, and described as ‘nonsense’ the thought that he had expressed what one critic had called ‘the disillusion of a generation’.⁴ Reportedly, he quipped:

To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.⁵

Some reviewers at the time had indeed been swift to grumble. ‘A grunt would serve equally well,’ wrote J. C. Squire, a conservative critic, who complained that the poem was incomprehensible.⁶ It was not only the establishment who took against it: from New Jersey, the young and radical poet William Carlos Williams believed it to be a great betrayal of America’s modernising project, and therefore a work in contradiction to its moment.⁷ But to others the poem was entirely of its moment, neither ‘insignificant’ nor ‘grumbling’, but a work that spoke from the heart of its era – which makes it all the more remarkable that it might also still speak to ours.

Rhythmical. The poem most certainly was, but not in ways that had readily been appreciated until that moment. The Waste Land was a poem of the electrifying age, and crowned a decade of experimentation in poetry that departed from what Ezra Pound – the poem’s greatest exponent – had called ‘the doughy mess’ of Victorian verse.⁸ Amid the ruins of the war, modern experience could no longer be constrained by traditional verse form or rigid metre: the world was too unruly, too chaotic and too shocking to be neatly wrapped and ribboned in rhyme. Never again could life return to the security of the Edwardian hearthside, and nor could literature; our burden, Eliot wrote darkly, was now ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.⁹

Personal. The poem was most certainly that. A despairing cry of a man suffering a series of private elegies: the loss of a father, an unrequited love, the suffocation of an ill-made marriage, an estrangement from family, a rejection of his work by an establishment and a collapse in his own health; the poem was written throughout severe mental and physical breakdown, and completed while Eliot repaired at a sanitorium.

But a poem must carry so much more than merely a personal rhythm in order to travel across centuries. So what is it exactly that conveys it through today? And how should we in our day make sense of a poem that even the likes of Yeats and Woolf struggled with in theirs?

Eliot knew something crucial about the connective pathway of poems, namely that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’.¹⁰ The path a poem travels is sensory first, and intellectual second, if intellectual at all. He implored us to read with our senses and that’s a fine starting point for The Waste Land: read it with your nerves.

Try not to look for the same kind of meaning that allows you to comprehend an instruction or a conversation, but instead allow the poem to ‘communicate’ with you, and see what kind of ‘understanding’ that brings in return.

Experience it with your senses rather than as a code to be cracked with your mind.

Hear it as you might a variety performance: a stage for a series of different acts and actors – dancers, a comic, a crooner, pub banter.

See it as a sequence of filmic reels cut and spliced and overlaid upon one another.

To do so is not to downplay or dispel the difficulty within the poem, or the notion that difficulty itself is a bad thing. (‘I wonder if you realise how difficult you are?’, Eliot was asked by his colleague in publishing, Geoffrey Faber, who at his own admission had been ‘groping’ painfully with the poem.¹¹) But if the poetry was difficult then Eliot had an answer for that, too: it was difficult because life in the wake of the war was difficult – ruinous, tortured, inexplicable and diseased, filled with chaos and confusion.¹² It’s likely that he didn’t only mean that circumstantially. The Waste Land seems to permit us the acknowledgement that life is difficult, that death is difficult, that pain and love and loss and even happiness can be difficult. And because difficulty exists in living, our responses to it are unlikely to be simple. This is the condition out of which The Waste Land was born, and, arguably, is the condition for much of poetry.

We lose love and we lose the ones we love. We fail in health, or fail in work, or cannot work or control events around us. The Waste Land is a poem that understands our quiet catastrophes, and that searches, as so many of us do in those moments, for a path out, for an illumination or redemption. Perhaps the poem doesn’t find it in the end, and perhaps that’s the hard truth of which we can’t let go: that sometimes we don’t, either; but the attempt that Eliot made gifted us with an experience in poetry that is like none other. No wonder that the poem should remain so very real to us now, at a moment when there is once again war in Europe, when Covid ravages as influenza did then, when economies seem once more on the brink of collapse. No wonder our modern mental health seems reflected and at stake.

We see ourselves in good poetry; but there are poems that extend yet further than that, and they’re the ones that sometimes get spoken of with greatness. In the end a poem isn’t ‘great’ because an uninformed subeditor or an expert opinion tells us that it is, but because, as readers, when we return to it repeatedly, we see more than ourselves and our moment within it: like a looking glass of our own life, but inversed, seen from a reflected angle that includes the world beyond ourselves. But then ‘greatness’ was never the question to ask of art, said Eliot firmly – that was a label to be conferred in the fullness of time, if at all. No, the question for art in any moment was not greatness but ‘genuineness’.¹³ Many doubted the genuineness of the poem in 1922; fewer do so now, one hundred years on. When Time magazine in 1923 questioned whether the poem was a ‘hoax’, what they were really conceding was the fact that they hadn’t yet uncovered the terms by which to experience the poem by.¹⁴

That’s why, when we ask what The Waste Land is about, we slightly misaddress the question, and why we miss an important precept in poetry. That a poem is not about an event; it is an event.¹⁵

The phrasing is said to be Robert Lowell’s, but Eliot made the same observation at the time of The Waste Land, when he entertained the idea that ‘A poem does not say something – it is something’. But what it is, and what kind of event it becomes, will depend upon that missing part of the equation: the reader’s own experience. Like an electrical system, a poem requires your participation as a reader in order to complete its circuit. At one level, the experience is the meaning: or put another way, as a reader you are essential in choosing to make the poem ‘something’ and not nothing. For what it’s worth, my own ‘something’ has been to experience the poem as a tangible response to a condition of reflecting crisis. And for me, at least, that makes it a sustaining companion for living and for life.

Footnotes

^[1] John Drury, ‘World’s Greatest Poem’, Chicago Daily News (14 Feb. 1923), 15
^[2] W. B. Yeats–T. S. Eliot, 23 Jan. 1923, Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. II: 1923–1925, London: Faber & Faber, 2009, 22n.
^[3] Virginia Woolf, 23 June 1922, Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II: 1920–1924, London: Hogarth Press, 178.
^[4] TSE, Thoughts after Lambeth, London: Faber & Faber, 1931; Selected Essays, Third Edition, 368.
^[5] TSE, ‘quoted by the late Professor Theodore Spencer during a lecture at Harvard University, and recorded by the Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., the poet’s brother’, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, London: Faber & Faber, 1971, 2022, 1.
^[6] J. C. Squire ‘Poetry’, London Mercury, 8, October 1922, 655–8.
^[7] William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, New York: New Directions, 146–50.
^[8] EP, ‘Hell’, Criterion, XIII. 52 (Apr. 1934), 382–96; Literary Essays, 205.
^[9] TSE, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, The Dial, November 1923, 480–3.
^[10] TSE, ‘Dante’, London: Faber & Faber, 1929, 8.
^[11] Geoffrey Faber–T. S. Eliot, 28 May 1925, Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. II, 662.
^[12] TSE, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Times Literary Supplement, 1031 (20 Oct. 1921), 669–70: ‘poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.’
^[13] TSE, ‘Ezra Pound’, Poetry, LXVIII. 6 (Sept. 1946), [326–38] 336.
^[14] Unsigned, ‘Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?’, Time, 1.1 (3 Mar. 1923), 12.
^[15] Helen Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, 167