The Waste Land and Other Poems: Including the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Eliot is a genius. The Wasteland is, by far, the best poem I have ever read. It is a bit difficult to get through, but I'm sure if you are thinking of picking up this book you are not looking for light reading. Also, of all the editions I've read, I think this one is the best. The notes on the reading are helpful and explain the text fairly well.

I think perhaps the wasteland has been to long interpeted as a lament, our a lecture, or even a statement about disillusioment. To me it seems to be the story of a non commital spiritualist lingering on the edge Nihilism, confused in pain and feeling empty as if no philosophy has prover satisfactory in his thirst for truth. I have known the morbid and dark mindstates Eliot describes, and I think that is what the wasteland is: a portrait of intense mental and spiritual torment, embellished with symbolism and shifting voices. But that is essentialy what it is, though each voice is distinct it seems to me that the torment of one man leaps between changing but always hinting that they are all his. It is in a way a dramatation of the utimate feelings of man between rationalism and Nihilism and hating both. Feeling that they are frauds and that the only truth is in the empty tired nothingness.

I remember when I first read through some parts of 'The Wasteland' when I was a teenager. I basically didn't get any of it, yet there was something that vividly burned itself in my mind. All that I could remember from the first reading was the departure of some nymphs and wind crossing brown land, a slimy rat's belly dragging across a bank, and some sailor on the bed of the sea being picked apart by a deep sea current. But it wasn't just the images that stuck; there was something else. What stuck, I think, is the 'visionary' quality some people refer to as being 'cinematic'. The writing in the poem has a way of getting you to view a whole assortment of apparently disconnected events as though you were a disembodied spirit -unnoticed, but there, listening in. I've read the poem quite a few more times since then, and you begin to notice the overall structure. When the poem gets to the last part, 'What the Thunder said', there is this transition that is at once magnificent, sobering, yet somewhat hallucinatory and disturbing. This part always gets me: "Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman -But who is that on the other side of you?" 'The Wasteland' is perhaps the least 'telly' of Eliot's work. I've come to appreciate more and more 'The Four Quartets' over any other of his works, but 'The Wasteland' remains the one poem of his that is the most tight, the one that gets across its business to the reader superbly, showing and not telling, while at the same time being the work of art that was the departure from the 'antiquated' verse, a whole new aesthetic that was no mere aesthetic, but was totally viable and worked and was vivid. While many of the other poems in this book are well worth reading, I'm not sure 'The Love Song of Prufrock' really belongs. I don't understand how that one always gets bundled into books containing 'The Wasteland' and Eliot's other poems, which are far superior to 'Prufrock'. To my mind 'Prufrock' has not held up over the years. It marks the experiment that Eliot was to take over the years to betterment. It had its glory in his day, but I can't help feeling the poem is really not all that good.

The Waste Land is sometimes considered to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century. This collection from Dover (at an amazing price) includes this and several other of Eliot's poems. The Waste Land, however, is considered to be his masterpiece, his 'epic,' in a sense. In fact, it is interesting to compare Eliot's bleak vision of a land of waste to other, earlier epics.The poem is in some sense a warning, in another sense a cry of despair. The image of the wasted land, of the spiritually degenerate human race, is depressing, yet the poem ends with a glimmer (albeit faint) of hope--salvation is possible, however unlikely. I am no expert on this poem, and like most people understand only fragments of it, but what I have gained from the poem I have found to be very enlightening, and very stirring. Eliot draws many references from the old legend of the Fisher-King, and an idea of what this legend is about (in all its many forms) is useful in interpreting the poem. This is undoubtedly one of the classics in both English literature and modernist writings, and very worthwhile for anyone who is willing to take the time to study it.

T.S. Eliot wrote "The Waste Land" against the backdrop of a world gone mad-- searching for reason inside chaos, and striving to build an ark of words by which future generations could learn what had gone before, T.S. Eliot explores that greatest of human melancholy-- disillusionment. This is a difficult poem, but one well-worth exploring to its fullest. The inherent rhythms of Eliot's speech, the delightful, though sometimes obscure, allusions, and intricate word-craft, create an atmosphere of civilization on the edge-- in danger of forgetting its past, and therefore repeating it. In the end, only the poet is left, to admonish the world to peace, to preserve the ruins of the old life, and to ensure that future generations benefit from the disillusions of the past. "Prufrock" is perhaps the best "mid-life crisis" poem ever written. In witty, though self-deprecating and often downright bitter, tones, Eliot goes on a madcap but infinitely somber romp through the human mind. This is a poem of contradictions, of repression, of human fear, and human self-defeat. Technically, "Prufrock" is brilliant, with a varied and intricate style suited to the themes of madness, love, and self-doubt. Buy this. You won't regret it. If you're an Eliot fan, you probably have it anyway. If you're not, you will be when you put it down.