The Waste Land

The poem itself barely yields to the subtractive test. Pound’s cuts left four hundred and thirty-three lines from drafts nearly twice as long, and what remains is load: the ten lines of “Death by Water” are the drowned god the whole poem waits on; the pub monologue in “A Game of Chess” is the lower answer to the upper scene’s Cleopatra; the typist’s quatrains are the poem’s centre of desire without love. Even its quotations are joints, not ornament. What holds the axis is the notes, which are part of the work. Some are required, those on Weston, the Tarot, Tiresias and the Fire Sermon; many are permitted rather than compelled, a page reference or an anecdote about Shackleton. The poem alone would stand higher.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a civilisation that has kept the fragments of its traditions and lost the faith that joined them has severed desire from love and speech from meaning, so that its living are as the dead. The crowd over London Bridge, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (63), is Dante’s limbo in the City; the typist and the clerk enact sex without will or feeling; “I can connect / Nothing with nothing” (301 to 302) states it from inside. The thunder’s three words, give, sympathise, control, name what is missing without restoring it. Held below the top on two charges: part of what the poem gives is a mood, the dread and exhaustion of its year; and the disclosure is partly bent by contempt, since the women and the clerks are seen with a disgust the poem does not examine.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached often, and in every register. The dreadful: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (30); the crowd of the dead on the Bridge; the woman’s nerves and the wind under the door; the burning at the close of the Fire Sermon. The visionary: the hyacinth girl, after which the speaker was “Looking into the heart of light, the silence” (41). The elegiac: Phlebas, drowned, passing the stages of his age and youth in the whirlpool. The sustained height is the fifth part: the dry mountains, the water-dripping song of the hermit-thrush, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” (359), the falling towers of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London, the empty chapel, the thunder. Held off the very top because the pub and parts of the Fire Sermon keep a deliberately low register, and the close disperses into fragments rather than rising.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Myth built, not evoked, though built from fragments. The Grail legend’s waste land, a country made sterile by its maimed king and waiting for the question or the rain, is the poem’s structure, not its atmosphere: drought in the first part, the dead god buried and drowned, the journey through the dry land to the chapel, the thunder, the king fishing with the arid plain behind him (424). Frazer’s dying gods give the burial its other face, in the corpse planted in a garden (71) that may yet sprout. Tiresias is the archetypal witness in whom, the note says, the persons meet, “the most important personage in the poem” (note to 218). The particulars stay particular: Lil and her teeth, the typist’s underclothes drying on the sill. Held a step below the top because part of the myth lives in the notes, and the rain never falls, so the structure is built to its last stage and not completed.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The inheritance is the long English poem with a governing voice, from Wordsworth to Tennyson, and the Georgian lyric of Eliot’s own decade. The departure is near total: no speaker, but a field of voices cut against one another without transitions; quotation in six languages as the poem’s own matter; a pub monologue set beside Shakespeare and the Upanishads; a scholarly apparatus attached to a lyric. The stake was real and was paid: on publication the poem was mocked as a hoax and a parody. Held below the top because the ground was shared: Laforgue and Pound had made the voice of collage, Pound’s early Cantos and Joyce’s Ulysses, of the same year, were making the mythical method, and Eliot’s own “Prufrock” and “Gerontion” had begun the turn.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The poem knows that a culture can survive as a heap of quotations no one can inhabit, and it is that heap: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (430) is the method as well as the confession. The absence of a governing speaker is the absence of a governing belief; the voices drift into one another, Marie into the prophet, the lady’s chair into the pub, because no consciousness holds them. The title the drafts carried for the first two parts, “He Do the Police in Different Voices”, names the instrument. The verse forms are argument: a blank-verse pastiche for the lady, quatrains for the typist, broken incantation for the thunder. A continuous narrative or a single lyric voice would have stated the theme and lost the condition. Held off the top because some of the unity is supplied from outside the verse by the notes, where a form should carry its own.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over a century. The readings are many and none has closed the poem: F. R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932); Cleanth Brooks’s reading of it as a single structure of Christian irony (1939); Hugh Kenner’s The Invisible Poet (1959); the biographical turn after the facsimile of the drafts in 1971, which read the marriage into “A Game of Chess”; Lawrence Rainey’s study of its composition and publication (2005); readings through Buddhism and the Upanishads, through gender, and through war and the demobilised Albert. The questions stay open: who speaks; whether Tiresias unifies the poem or only claims to; whether the close is a promise of rain or a breakdown; what the third figure is. Held a step below the top because some of the century’s labour has gone into decoding the allusions, which is difficulty before depth.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The field is poetry in English in the 1920s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a long poem could be: a structure of juxtaposition rather than argument or narrative, with allusion as its substance and myth as its binding. Held below the top because Pound and Joyce shared the reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the poem won the Dial Award for 1922; it became the central text of high modernism in English poetry and of the New Criticism, which was formed in large part in reading it; it was answered by Hart Crane’s The Bridge and resisted by William Carlos Williams, so that the American poetry after it defined itself for and against it; and beyond English, George Seferis translated it into Greek in 1936.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and four years. Form: the poem survives whole, as published, with its notes, and the publication of the drafts in 1971 added to what is known without taking anything from the text. Presence is wide and continuous: in print throughout, taught wherever modern poetry in English is taught, translated into many languages, and marked by a centenary in 2022 that brought new editions and studies. It stops short of the widest presence its span could show, because its standing has been contested since the 1950s, by the American line that ran from Williams and in the reckoning with its author’s opinions, and because its presence outside the study of poetry is narrower than a novel’s. Fabric carries no charge: the variants between early editions are minor.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the ear and of the cut. The opening’s participles, falling at the line-ends, set a rhythm of reluctant life in four lines. The lady’s chamber is a single long sentence of baroque pastiche that collapses into nerves; the pub monologue catches a voice exactly and lets “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” fall across it like a bell; the typist’s scene is in pentameter quatrains whose decorum is the scene’s indecency; “What the Thunder Said” builds an incantation out of the absence of water. The juxtapositions are placed with a precision that makes the gaps speak. Held below the top on two charges: a few joins rely on allusion the verse does not carry alone, and the satire of the clerk and the typist slips into sneer, which is a lapse of control as well as of sympathy.

Score: 9.4 / 10

One law governs: under drought, every act of love, speech or faith fails to reach its object, and the poem waits for water. Take the two most distant elements: Lil’s friend in the pub, on teeth and pills and the demobilised husband, and the thunder speaking Sanskrit over the Himalaya. They obey one law: the pub’s sterile marriage is a waste land, and the thunder’s first word asks what has been given. The range is extreme, from the music-hall to scripture, from Cleopatra’s barge to a London pub, and it holds. Charged: the law is partly announced rather than enacted, through the notes and through Tiresias’s claim to have suffered all of it before; and the last lines, a run of quotations ending in “Shantih” (433), have struck readers since 1922 as a collapse of the poem’s order as much as its completion, a question the poem leaves open at a cost.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged on what four hundred and thirty-three lines hold. The city: London as a city of the dead. Sexuality and marriage, from the lady and her nerves to the typist and to Lil. War, in Stetson and the ships at Mylae, in demobilised Albert, in the falling towers. History, from Carthage and Elizabeth on the Thames to the European capitals. The sacred, in the Grail, Christ on the road to Emmaus, the Buddha’s fire sermon, Augustine and the Upanishads. The natural order, as drought, river and thunder. Consciousness, in the hyacinth moment. Class, in the distance between the chamber and the pub. They are integrated by the drought myth, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the scale: labour and the family across time are only glimpsed, every order arrives in a fragment of a few lines, and the poem’s length cannot hold any of them at length.

Score: 8.3 / 10