I like how John Crowe Ransom calls The Waste Land “one of the most insubordinate poems in the language” (Norton Critical Edition 170)—and he doesn’t mean it as a backwards compliment. He just doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like what it stands for, which he thinks is a “negation of philosophy,” a rejection of traditional “cosmological principles” (168). It purposely creates, by its disjointedness and refusal of sound aesthetics, a bewilderment of ideas from which the poem can’t recover. Ransom praises Eliot’s earlier poetry, and his great ability with language, but thinks this piece “restores him intellectually to his minority” (169).

Of course, Ransom has a point (as he always seems to have). I have great respect for him and the often-crotchety Agrarians and hesitate to criticize him from this distance, but maybe distance, or proximity, is the problem. Maybe he was too close (temporally) to the poem to see what Eliot was doing with it—that really he and Eliot have more in common philosophically than he thought in 1923—that the insubordination of The Waste Land wasn’t toward order, but was maybe toward the chaos of the world that it reflects.