Immense Panorama of Futility and Anarchy...Thirsting for Redemption and Renewal...The Waste Land@100

Michiko Kakutani, ‘Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread’, 2020:

“…After decades of being taught in high school and college, after its innovations have been widely assimilated, imitated, and satirized, The Waste Land might now strike some readers as familiar, even trite. It’s hard to appreciate just how radical it was when it was first published, breaking old rules of prosody and using new language and techniques to tackle what were then unfashionable themes of spiritual alienation and urban malaise.

But reread today, the poem’s evocation of the broken world left in the wake of World War I remains remarkably resonant. It depicts a world in which the old rules and certainties have vanished—a spiritual desert where “the dead tree gives no shelter,” where lonely people move numbly through an “Unreal City,” where the poet “can connect / Nothing with nothing.”

Eliot once observed that the poem was written as “the relief of a personal…grouse against life,” and it was, in part, a reflection of his own state of mind as he struggled with a miserable marriage and a nervous breakdown. But much the way that Kafka’s work, which was rooted in his relationship with a domineering father, yielded lasting metaphors for modern life and politics, so did Eliot’s Waste Land mirror larger dynamics in the world. It’s a world not unlike our own, haunted by a sense of loss and dislocation—a world, to use words written by Eliot in an essay about Ulysses, that presented an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” while thirsting for redemption and renewal.”

Robert Crawford, 'Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land', 2015:

“…It was 15 December when The Waste Land became an American book. One thousand copies were printed, each stamped with an individual number, published from 105 W. 40th Street, New York. Hard at work assembling the contents for the next few issues of the Criterion, Tom opened the small, pale-jacketed volume in his London flat. Slightly heavier than it looked, underneath the dust jacket it was bound in black boards with only the words THE WASTE LAND in gold on the front board. Inside, the poem now carried its Latin and Greek epigraph (though no dedication), and was printed in large type – never more than sixteen lines of poetry per page. Thanks to this generous spacing and to the added prose ballast of the Notes, it managed to fill sixty-four pages. Throughout, the verse carried line numbers (one every ten lines), as if to bind together a work that kept threatening to explode into separate shards. The inside front-jacket flap quoted an early review by Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune, calling The Waste Land ‘a thing of bitterness and beauty’ and, ‘perhaps, the finest poem of this generation’. The note on the rear flap began simply, ‘T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri’, then went on to hail him as ‘without question the most significant of the younger American writers’. Tom, weary and very far from the city of his birth, looked at the name ‘T. S. Eliot’ in plain black print on the title page.

It was as if he had never been young.”