The Waste Land

War-torn Europe. The lack of community. Lackluster human relationships. And the difference between the historical sense and literary history. I didn't know so much could be packed into one poem. But Eliot did it in "The Waste Land." There is no possible way I could talk about the entire poem in one entry here, so I will focus on just the first part, "The Burial of the Dead."

I wish I could figure out how to get the YouTube version of this, but for all you auditory people out there, I'll just put the link in here. This is Eliot reading "The Burial of the Dead."

And now, let me attempt this... and really, I'm attempting in all senses of the word. I have no idea what I'm going to come up with, and really, I'm at a loss for where to begin. So, I guess I will just start right at the beginning:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
Winter kept us warm....

Right now, let's just start with poetic "worth." Or rather, what Eliot is doing in this poem. April, in my mind, is never the cruelest month, and winter never really keeps you warm. The striking connections he makes right from the beginning draws the reader in. But just these five lines hold so many allusions... really, it's crazy (yes, I know that's not a very critical statement, but I just had to say it). First off, on the basest level, it is talking of a cycle of death and rebirth, albeit an "overturned" one. And this reminded me of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent, " and Eliot's take on tradition: "What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career." According to Eliot, the past is not gone, but is part of the present, and the author must mix the two to make something completely new, but also something that seeps with the aura of tradition. In his essay, he uses the analogy of platinum introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. When the two gases are mixed, they form sulphurous acid: "This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged." Tradition is the basis of the poem, but the poem has transformed that tradition into something else. When reading these five lines of "The Waste Land," this was so heavily apparent in the mixture of memory (tradition) and desire (the individual's talents and personal work that inevitably relies on said tradition). And hasn't tradition (or winter / the past) "kept us warm" for all these years? That is what we have relied upon. The texts we have studied are all in the past, and we look to those (from our memory) and understand the present body of literature in regards to the past, whether we think we are doing that or not. But much of our lives are based in memory, so it follows that, whether consciously or subconsciously, we always have the past as a background for what we are reading / writing / hearing in the present and envisioning for the future.

I have also been trying to figure out the difference here between historical sense and literary history. But in light of what I just discovered, I may not be that far away... a literary historian studies the past, knowing that it is gone. So, their winters are kept warm, but their dull roots (for the past can become dull if not enlivened by the present) are not watered by spring rains. An historical sense, on the other hand, is kept warm by a knowledge of their winters, but in their awareness of the past in their present writings, spring rains have enlivened their dull roots, and they mix their memory with desire... creating something new, yet something quite old, too.

And I have no idea if any of that made any sense. I really am just groping around in the dark on this one... but I would encourage you to read the poem... complicated and difficult as it is, maybe you can see a lot more than I ever could have touched on in this post...