Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I could literally write a whole thesis (heck, dissertation) on this poem—its conception, its epigraph, Ezra Pound's influence on it—but Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviews are limited and I don't wanna lose my mind.

"The Waste Land" (1922) is a poem by T. S. Eliot (written when good ole Thomas Stearns was 34 years old), widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins". DO YOU HEAR ME SCREAM???

"The Waste Land" does not follow a single narrative or feature a consistent style or structure. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy, and features abrupt and unannounced changes of narrator, location, and time, conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. It employs many allusions to the Western canon: Ovid's Metamorphoses (ICONIC), the legend of the Fisher King, Dante's Divine Comedy (BAE!), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales etc. etc.

The poem is divided into five sections. The first, "The Burial of the Dead", introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, "A Game of Chess", employs alternating narrations in which vignettes of several characters display the fundamental emptiness of their lives. "The Fire Sermon" offers a philosophical meditation in relation to self-denial and sexual dissatisfaction; "Death by Water" is a brief description of a drowned merchant; and "What the Thunder Said" is a culmination of the poem's previously exposited themes explored through a description of a desert journey.

Eliot originally considered entitling the poem "He Do the Police in Different Voices" (YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND HOW ICONIC THIS MAN IS!!!!!!), and in the original manuscripts the first two sections of the poem appear under this title. Baby, if it had stayed this way I would've been the happiest woman on Earth. It is the PERFECT TITLE for this poem. This phrase is taken from Charles Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend, in which the widow Betty Higden says of her adopted foundling son Sloppy: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices."

More iconic than the poem's initial title (can you imagine that's possible? no, then buckle the fuck up) is its final epigraph. The poem is preceded by a Latin and Ancient Greek epigraph (without translation) from chapter 48 of the Satyricon of Petronius: "With my own eyes I saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a bottle and, when the attendants asked her what she wanted, she replied, 'I want to die.'" SCREAMING, CRYING, THROWING UP. No one gets CALL OF THE VOID like Thomas Stearns did. Like, my guy was depressed on another level. He would strive on Tumblr.

Eliot originally intended the epigraph to be a small section of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness describing the death of the character Kurtz: "Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, � he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath�'The horror! the horror!'" Pound suggested it be changed as he felt Conrad was not "weighty" enough, although it is unclear if he was referring to the author or the quotation itself. As much as I love Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I'm with Pound on this one. It doesn't get more iconic than the Cumaean Sibyl.

Following the epigraph is a dedication (added in a 1925 republication) that reads "For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro" ("the better craftsman"). This dedication was originally handwritten by Eliot in the 1922 Boni & Liveright edition of the poem presented to Pound. [brb i'm crying over my two soft boys. <33]