TS Eliot 2: The Waste Land

After the triumph of Prufrock and other Observations, TS Eliot almost steered the car into the ditch, poetically and personally. Under the influence of his friend, the fascist poet Ezra Pound - a man who later achieved notoriety for his enthusiastic support of Hitler during the Second World War - Eliot’s second collection of poems reveled in antisemitism, misogyny and willful obscurity. He even wrote poems in French. Pretentious, moi?

In this episode, we show how just in the time - with the beret almost on his head - Eliot managed to cast it aside, regain control of the wheel, and steer the vehicle away from the boulevards of Paris into the waste land. As ever, our question is: how?

In the hyperbolic spirit of a Discovery channel documentary, we think it’s fair to say that The Waste Land, published in two magazines in1922, then by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press in 1923, changed the world FOREVER.

For readers at the time, Eliot captured the spiritual malaise of Europe after the first World War. Nobody could definitively explain the poem - although many had their theories - but it captured more than any realist novel the spirit of the age. It influenced many of the greatest books of the 20th Century, including The Great Gatsby, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and many books of poetry. We ourselves are guilty of having written utter bollocks about this poem during our undergraduate years. In consequence of which, we tremble before our microphones for this week’s episode.

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