The Waste Land and Other Writings

by T. S. Eliot, Mary Karr (Introduction)

Overview

First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."

As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.

In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience. First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."

As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.

In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307425041
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/29/2009
Series:	Modern Library Classics
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Widely honored for his poetry, criticism, essays and plays, he was a leader of the modernist movement and is today read throughout the world.

Mary Karr is the author of the bestselling The Liar's Club and Cherry. She lives in Syracuse, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Portrait of a Lady

Thou hast committed
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.
The Jew of Malta.

I
Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself as it will seem to do
With I have saved this afternoon for you;
And four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips.

So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends
Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom
That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.

And so the conversation slips
Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
Through attenuated tones of violins
Mingled with remote cornets
And begins.

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
[For indeed I do not love it . . . you knew? you are not blind!
How keen you are!]
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you

Without these friendships life, what cauchemar!
Among the windings of the violins
And the ariettes
Of cracked cornets
Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious monotone
That is at least one definite false note.

Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the monuments,
Discuss the late events,
Correct our watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

Table of Contents

	How to Read "The Waste Land" So It Alters Your Soul Rather Than Just Addling Your Head	ix
	The Waste Land and Other Poems
	Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)	3
	The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock	3
	Portrait of a Lady	8
	Preludes	12
	Rhapsody on a Windy Night	14
	Morning at the Window	16
	The Boston Evening Transcript	16
	Aunt Helen	17
	Cousin Nancy	17
	Mr. Apollinax	18
	Hysteria	19
	Conversation Galante	19
	La Figlia Che Piange	20
	Poems (1920)	22
	Gerontion	22
	Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar	25
	Sweeney Erect	26
	A Cooking Egg	28
	Le Directeur	29
	Melange Adultere de Tout	30
	Lune de Miel	30
	The Hippopotamus	31
	Dans Le Restaurant	32
	Whispers of Immortality	33
	Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service	35
	Sweeney Among the Nightingales	36
	The Waste Land	38
	The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
	Introduction	59
	The Perfect Critic	64
	Imperfect Critics	76
	Tradition and the Individual Talent	99
	The Possibility of a Poetic Drama	109
	Euripides and Professor Murray	117
	"Rhetoric" and Poetic Drama	123
	Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe	129
	Hamlet and His Problems	137
	Ben Jonson	144
	Philip Massinger	158
	Swinburne as Poet	174
	Blake	180
	Dante	186
	Andrew Marvell	197
	John Dryden	212
	The Metaphysical Poets	224