The Waste Land and Other Poems Read Free Page A

squatting Jew in ‘Gerontion’ to the saggy Chicago Semite in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,’ from the stereotypically fiduciary Sir Alfred Mond in ‘A Cooking Egg’ to the stereotypically voracious and whorish Rachel nee Rabinovitch in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales.’ The slurs that resonate in these poems testify to Eliot’s increasing disturbance, and probably, as in most cases of prejudice, a desire to blame ‘the other’ as a scapegoat for the cultural decadence and failure of the mainstream, empowered society. The poems here are philosophical, in a perverse, anti-rational way—exactly what one might expect from someone who had embraced but then abandoned the discipline of philosophy. Eliot’s eclectic (and sometimes disorienting) influences in this collection include Lewis Carroll, Henry Adams, John Ruskin, French Symbolists, and Jacobean dramatists, among many others.
    Three of the poems feature a character named Sweeney. Eliot once described him ‘as a man who in younger days was perhaps a pugilist, mildly successful; who then grew older and retired to keep a pub.’ He is meant to evoke, obviously, an Irishman (with all the class and nationalist prejudices one might expect from an elitist English perspective) who is coarse and boorish but also, disturbingly, casts a powerful presence: He is a loose cannon, sexually potent and physically aggressive. He stumbles into Eliot’s tableaux and causes a rude disturbance: The quatrain poems attempt to regroup themselves, to adapt to his existence, which they do with a strained, excessive, tenuous classicist intellectualism that sets off Sweeney’s character all the more sharply. Sweeney embodies Eliot’s obsession, in his 1920 poems, with a visceral figure who is starkly opposed to the demure, repressed, polite (if artificial) society figures that populate Prufrock.
    In Prufrock, the general milieu of the poems was a detailed, specific, urban streetscape: one that seemed typical of London, though actually many of the poems owe more to Eliot’s youthful meandering among the byways of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Poems 1920, the atmosphere is more broadly European: There is a wider and richer (but also, certainly, an ironized and perverted) sense of the entire continent, from Brussels to Limoges, from London and Paris to Ravenna, Padua, Milan, and Venice. (In The Waste Land, the topography will synthesize these two extremes: The poem traverses both the localized London streets and the more panoramic spectacle of Europe.) Indeed, four of the poems are in French. Editions published during Eliot’s lifetime did not include translations accompanying these poems; presumably, he wanted them to remain elusive to a monoglot audience, and if one wanted to read poems in French, then one must simply learn French. Perhaps Eliot wanted to celebrate a sense of cosmopolitan culture by including several works in another language; he was probably also showing off his cultural breadth. Finally, as Samuel Beckett (an Irishman who wrote many of his works in French) discovered, a writer may accomplish certain effects by working in a language that is not his primary tongue: a studied sense of detachment or alienation, perhaps. Disregarding Eliot’s resistance to making his French verse accessible to a larger reading audience, the present edition includes English renditions of these poems.
     
    If we regard Eliot’s first two collections as thesis/antithesis, then the synthesis was accompanied by (and probably in many ways facilitated by) a personal breakdown in 1921. The Waste Land is a record of the poet’s collapse, as well as the sign of his recovery. As he traveled back from Switzerland, where he had undergone treatment, to resume his life in England, Eliot left a draft of the poem in Paris for Ezra Pound to edit. The poem records a nervous breakdown, but more importantly it recounts how the poet imposes a sense of order, coherence, and direction on