Parsing the labyrinth of allusions in The Waste Land is difficult, first of all, because it is not always clear when Eliot is quoting at all. Some of his sources leap out at me. Most of them I do not recognize, reading the poem on my own. You might say that reading this work without reference to the annotations can hardly be called reading it at all. In order to spur thinking on the poem, I went back to my notes from late 2011, the last time I studied it. I guess it's a healthy sign that I've at least grown enough to be embarrassed by what I wrote then; "In order to 'make it new,'" I observed, "modernist writers made it obscure." This sounds more cynical than I probably intended, but I recognize more fully now the density of allusion in Eliot is not pure literary elitism so much as an attempt to develop a new language of modernism, a language which could incorporate and make sense of the enormity of literature which preceded Eliot. The line that most stuck with me the last time I read the poem was "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," which I think describes Eliot's modus operandi in The Waste Land. He assembles fragments of culture, "a heap of broken images," as a kind of collective cultural memory. If we can make sense of this past, perhaps we can make sense of the present. This is a terribly vague reading of the poem, but it's a place to start.

Perhaps Eliot is suggesting that the chaos of modernity, most destructively manifested in the Great War, is an affront to the "unreal cities" of past culture? Eliot allows modern life and modern technology to literally vulgarize the literature of the past: "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," is satirically replaced with "The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring." Similarly, Eliot blends Shakespeare with Irving Berlin, to create "that Shakespeherian Rag- / It's so elegant / So intelligent." This collision of "high" and "low" culture is a central feature in modernist and postmodernist texts, but it's not clear to me if its something that Eliot delights in or decries. He does seem to view modernity, the unstoppable forward motion of time, the usurpation of the past by the present, the present by the future, as a violent and destructive process, resulting in "Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal." This is such a rich, mysterious poem that it's difficult to know how to begin trying to comprehending it. Which gives us some sense of the confusion Eliot must have felt in attempting to confront the entire Western literary tradition. I wish I had something more concrete or insightful to say, but I look forward to examining the work in greater depth in class this week.