{"id":116237,"date":"2022-10-31T08:11:01","date_gmt":"2022-10-31T12:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=116237"},"modified":"2022-10-31T19:14:29","modified_gmt":"2022-10-31T23:14:29","slug":"lh-the-most-important-poem-of-the-20th-century-on-t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-at-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=116237","title":{"rendered":"(LH) The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d at 100"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Crawford:\u00a0<\/strong>Though I do understand why people often see\u2014and hear\u2014\u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\u201d as inventing modern poetry in English, I think\u00a0The Waste Land\u00a0<\/em>does so more comprehensively. It\u2019s as if this poem can give anything\u2014a cry, a list of place-names, a snatch of conversation, a Sanskrit word, a nursery rhyme, an echo\u2014an almost infinite and carrying resonance that brings with it unforgettable intensity. Ezra Pound who, prior to editing\u00a0The Waste Land,\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0had just been editing an English translation of an avant-garde collage-style French poem by Jean Cocteau, helped give the poem its intensity; but the words were Eliot\u2019s.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve argued in\u00a0Young Eliot<\/em>, Pound\u2019s editing was highly ethical in that he did not add or substitute words of his own; he just honed what Eliot had written. Eliot had learned from Pound\u2019s\u00a0bricolage\u00a0<\/em>style, but where Pound went on to go on and on and on, Eliot (with Pound\u2019s editorial help) learned as a young poet just when to stop. That\u2019s a great gift. So the poem exemplifies at once the way in which poetry can incorporate all kinds of diverse materials; yet it also constitutes a supreme example of poetic intensity. It\u2019s quite a combination\u2014and one from which innumerable poets (from Auden to Xu Zhimo and from MacDiarmid to Okigbo and beyond) have learned.<\/p>\n

David Barnes<\/strong>: Basil Bunting famously compared Ezra Pound\u2019s\u00a0Cantos\u00a0<\/em>to the Alps: a poet \u2018would have to go a long way around\u2019 if they wanted to avoid them. I don\u2019t know if\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>\u00a0is quite like that. Certainly, poetry was not the same after\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>; at the same time, it\u2019s perhaps more difficult to trace the influence of the poem than it is with Pound\u2019s experimentations. In some ways, it\u2019s quite difficult to go forward after\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>, as it\u2019s a poem that seems to have said it all. I sometimes wonder if\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>\u00a0hasn\u2019t had more of an influence on the modern novel.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe poem is such a key landmark that all modern poets know it, whether they swerve around it, crash into it, or attempt to assimilate it.\u201d
https:\/\/t.co\/Q0rBR0MeSh<\/a><\/p>\n

— Literary Hub (@lithub) October 29, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n