The Waste Land brings together a mashup of voices from different sources. These voices come from different times, past and present, different classes of society, people of different genders, and they are even packaged in several different languages. In some ways, T.S. Eliot presents himself not as a poet but as a collector of these voices, an editor instead of an author. The poem is completely different from a poem by Keats, for example, who most often paid close attention to form, rhyme, euphonia, etc. The Waste Land crashes many different sounds and speakers together, so that the resulting poem looks like a collage of former poems. He also irrerevently places the dialogue from a pub on the same page as the line "Those are pearls that were his eyes", a quote from Shakespeare.
With references to writers like Shakespeare and Dante, Eliot is not merely invoking the words of dead generations for their conciseness and wisdom. On the contrary, he is exhuming their words in order to examine their usefulness to the modern age. Given the obscurity of the poem, it is not clear what the reader is supposed to conclude from this practice. But the fact that Eliot is implicitly questioning canonized literature raises the question of how his own poem ought to be read and studied, if at all. This partly mocking attitude is his way of confronting the reader directly, by means of the poem. He is proposing a new relationship between literature and history, and the opacity of the poem is his challenge to the reader to figure out the answer to his question.
Comments
Lauren Mitchell
Mon, 03/11/2013 - 17:19
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I, too, found the
I, too, found the juxtaposition of Shakespeare's language with more commonplace customs interesting. For example Eliot sticks a quote from the Tempest right in the middle of his long speech about Madame Sosostris and her tarot cards, a tradition not commonly found in circles of upperclass society, I would think, though spiritual parlor games/tricks like Tarot and Fortune-telling were perhaps more socially presentable habits in Eliot's day than in ours. Placing Shakespeare, obviously a great author, back-to-back with a common fortune teller applies a universality to the audience of the poem, but I also think that Eliot is purposely poking fun at his work. Placing Shakespeare on the level of Madame Sosostris seems ridiculous, and Eliot knows it. He's calling attention to his references as being flourishes, and not the actual work itself.
Jack Welch
Mon, 03/11/2013 - 22:24
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Your use of the word "mashup"
Your use of the word "mashup" caught my attention, and made me consider how The Waste Land anticipates the chaos of our Internet age, a great cultural equalizer which forever puts fragments of past and present, high and low, in collision with one another. Is there any better description of the Internet in literature than "a heap of broken images?" I think some of your descriptions of the poem are very evocative, and they set my thinking down other trails; you suggest that Eliot thinks of himself as "a collector of these voices, an editor instead of an author," and that he "crashes many different sounds and speakers together." That idea of "crash," for whatever reason, put me in mind of the apocalyptic traffic jam, a visualization of modernity (or post-modernity, or something), which is the centerpiece of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Weekend. That Eliot would make me think of Godard undoubtedly has as much to do with my own interests as any direct connection between them, but in some ways they are similar artists. In Godard's Bande à part, a student quotes Eliot on the subject of tradition: "Everything that is new is thereby automatically traditional." Godard's messy juxtapositions of European philosophy and canonical literature with American film noir and popular music recall the juxtapositions that you're describing; a quest to understand what it means to be "new," what it means to be "traditional."
Logan Eddy
Tue, 03/12/2013 - 08:14
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I like how you felt that
I like how you felt that Eliot was using the past to see how it would stand up in modern times. I felt something similar as I felt that Eliot was trying to see if he could stand on the shoulders of those who came before him to reach greater heights and depths.