A Modernist Manifesto: Exploring T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, Joe and Maya delve into T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking 1922 poem, 'The Waste Land.' Widely hailed as one of the most significant works of modernist poetry, 'The Waste Land' reshaped literary history with its fragmented structure, interwoven voices, and provocative allusions to mythology, religion, and everyday life.

Joe and Maiya unpack Eliot’s kaleidoscopic use of symbols—from the Arthurian Fisher King to Eastern scriptures—discussing how the trauma of the First World War and the fast-changing early 20th century shaped the poem’s tone of disillusionment. They highlight Ezra Pound’s crucial role as “editor extraordinaire” and explore Eliot’s complex interplay of past and present, culminating in the final mantra-like call for peace in Sanskrit. Together, they illuminate how Eliot’s “collage” of cultures, languages, and literary references both challenges and rewards readers over a century later.

Get exclusive PDFs on 'The Waste Land' available to Poetry+ users:

• Full PDF Guide
• Poetry Snapshot PDF
• T. S. Eliot PDF Guide
• Modernism PDF Guide

Tune in and discover:

• The poem’s revolutionary role in the rise of modernism
• Eliot’s use of mythic, religious, and pop-cultural references
• How WWI’s upheaval shaped the fragmentation and despair
• Why 'The Waste Land' continues to influence poets, critics, and readers today

Transcript

A Modernist Manifesto: Exploring T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' (Transcript)
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Joe: [00:00:00] 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, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers.

Maiya: Hello and welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+. Thank you so much for your reading at the start there,Joe, of the poem we're going to be talking about today, which is T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Now, I am very excited to talk about this It is one of the 20th century's most famous poems.

And not solely for how long it is,

But for how it changed the course of modernist poetry. So today we'll be talking about the birth of modernism, fragmentation, disillusionment, and the importance of [00:01:00] poetic collaboration. But Joe, let's talk about T. S. Eliot. What can you tell us about him?

Joe: Thanks, Maiya. T. S. Eliot was born in Missouri in the United States in 1888, but spent most of his adult life living and working in the UK. He first moved to the UK when he was 25 years old in 1914, settled there, eventually becoming a British citizen in 1927. Now, T. S. Eliot remains one of the most important literary figures of the entire 20th century.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1948 before passing away in 1965. Now if we zoom in on The Waste Land, and this is , really important to get a sense of when this was taking place. The Waste Land was published in 1922, which is the year that literary modernism really took hold. So this is the same year That James Joyce's incredibly influential novel Ulysses is published and the two men will talk a little bit more about their relationship between Eliot and Joyce a little bit later on, but this year changed the course of literary history.

There is a before and there is an [00:02:00] after 1922. Now, for any listeners who've been following our mini series on the poets of the First World War, you will be aware of the fact that the First World War was an important context for the birth of modernism. And the kind of public consciousness that came out the other side of the First World War is a big part of what influenced writers like Eliot. But, 

it comes to the poem itself, , for any listeners out there who perhaps have a preconception about this poem, that it might be difficult, I'm going to give you permission. It's okay to find this poem difficult, right? It is a famously complex work. As Maiya mentioned, it's quite a long poem. It comes in at 434 lines in total, split across five sections.

I'm going to talk more about those sections later on, but the poem is , A kind of condensed mix of different influences . We've got religious texts, we've got nursery rhymes, we've got different languages, many different voices in this kind of kaleidoscopic experience and that sense of being overwhelmed, that sense of the poem, drawing on many different influences is absolutely [00:03:00] crucial to understanding what Eliot was trying to do. Fundamentally. This poem is in many ways a manifesto for what modernism is, what modernism can be. Now Maia, I read the opening lines of the first section, The Burial of the Dead, to kick off the episode.

Is that where you'd like to begin?

Maiya: I think so. I think it's , very important to look at these opening lines in a manner of kind of setting out what Eliot is trying to achieve with this poem. Because as I mentioned in my opening, it really begins to set out all of these key themes that we see throughout the poem itself.

And I want to focus in on that first line. It's incredibly famous for just how well it's written, but April is the cruelest month. Breeding lilacs out of the dead land. Now I want to touch on the fact that April in literature is often seen as a month of rebirth, it's a spring month, it's usually seen as bright.

In the UK we talk about April showers, the rain that brings the new life. But here, April is manifested as a cruel month. It's [00:04:00] something that reminds people of what has been lost. And here, this is such a stark reversal of the typical things that we expect when we hear the month April, that it already sets the reader up to be disappointed by what's going to come.

And I think that is key . When we talk about The Waste Land. Because what we consistently see is fragmentation, disillusionment, an imbalance when it comes to addressing the positive things. , I love the fact that, The Burial of the Dead is the first section and it opens by reminding you that everything that is positive may not be seen as such.

Joe: My birthday is in April, and frankly, Eliot, I'm not over it. I'm not over it. No, I think you're absolutely right. I think that But that line stands alone, there are a great many quotable moments in this poem. In fact, this poem, perhaps more than almost any other in the 20th century, has provided the titles for novels, poems, TV shows, films, in the more than 100 years since its publication in [00:05:00] 1922.

But, Those opening lines, I think you're right, they absolutely establish a lot of the key themes here. And I think I'd just like to look after that line, April is the cruelest month, because then we have breeding lilacs out of the dead land. And that juxtaposition between something dead, something that is perhaps decaying, and that sense of Maia mentioned, invokes that sense of new life, new generation, is one of the kind of, the many moments of conflict that are going to go on to define this poem.

This idea of life being birthed from something that is dead, and that word breeding, it's incredibly impersonal. It's incredibly mechanical. This is about processes. It's not about affection or feeling, but also that. phrase the dead land is really important here because one of the many allusions in this poem is of the Fisher King. And for those who aren't aware, the Fisher King is a kind of figure from Arthurian legend, the legend about the Holy Grail, which is one of the things that Eliot returns to again and again in this poem. And the Fisher King is in these Arthurian stories, [00:06:00] one of the last protectors of the grail. But crucially, the Fisher King is wounded. The Fisher King has some kind of unspecified wound to his leg, or possibly his groin, and he is therefore impotent, infertile, and as is the case with lots of kind of Medieval portrayals of kingship the physical health of the king is reflected in the state of the nation that he is the king of so The fisher king's impotence his infertility is reflected in the fact that the land is barren The land is one where things don't grow where things are dark and obscure and dusty and dirty. So it's not a massive stretch to see where the kind of inspiration for Eliot's wasteland comes from. It comes from this image of the Fisher King that is evoked by that phrase, the dead land and other lines within this poem. One of the really interesting parallels we have between the Fisher King, in those Arthurian stories, and Eliot's poem, is that there is an absence of hope here. The Fisher King situation in the original Arthurian [00:07:00] legend is predicated on the idea that one day something will change. Somebody will claim the Grail, Christ will return to reinvigorate this land. In Eliot's poem, there is no sense of reinvigoration. There is no sense of progress. This is a poem and a landscape that is devoid of hope, devoid of life, and entirely barren, entirely without vitality and energy.

Maiya: I think it's such a fascinating method, the way that Eliot in this poem can take us from, , a moment in ancient mythology, all the way forward to a modern experience. A few lines later, drinking coffee over a summer in a different country in a modern day. And I think it's such an interesting way of continually dislocating the reader. Because, again, Even though he's, in these later lines, introducing Summer, you have the memory of this dead land, of this wasteland.

You have the memory that you seem to have just left something behind without any [00:08:00] resolution. And I think that, again, feeds into the story of the Fish King, because you have no sense of resolution, you almost feel as if the story itself doesn't have a centre. I often feel when I read this poem that, all of these fragments are kind of pieces around a wheel, and we keep going and going.

And finally you get to the end, but you just don't feel complete, you don't feel resolved. And I think that sense , of barrenness really contributes to , this discomfort that you feel as a reader, to be honest.

Joe: And I think If we could just zoom out here and touch on kind of one of the key themes of modernist literature because I think it's really relevant to this. Modernism is one of those terms that gets bandied around a lot and goodness me, we could do many more podcasts and maybe we will in the future do a podcast episode about the movement that we now know as modernism, about its origins, about its different components.

And again, if any listeners would like to hear that episode,, we want to make episodes that you guys want to listen to. So make sure you email. With any suggestions for future episodes, whether that's about [00:09:00] modernism, a particular movement or anything else. But one of the key things about modernism, at entry level is a lot of it is about interiority. It's about taking the experience of literature and trying to reflect an internal experience rather than replicate external events accurately. And now one of the key things here is that this allows Writers to be a lot more fluid in the way that they tell their stories I'm going to name drop here an important philosopher who's an important presence on the modernist period, and that's Henri Bergson. Now, Bergson was very interested in the concept of time, and he famously described time as having two faces. You have external, measurable time, the kind of time that we use clocks and calendars to plot the development of, and we have internal time, that same feeling that can make, an exam feel like a lifetime and,, a wonderful summer's day feel like it flips away in an instant. Our perception of time is filtered by our experience of the world around us. Now, what you have there as a modernist writer who were very influenced by Bergson's idea [00:10:00] of time is you have the ability to Stretch moments, if you want to, but also condense other moments. So, what The Waste Land is doing, and The Waste Land features many different narrators, many different speakers, but their experience of the world around them is filtered through their interior monologue, their interior perception of the world. So that ability to move freely is Maiya said between a kind of a internal reflection about April to suddenly be elsewhere Having a coffee to suddenly be elsewhere doing something else is a reflection of this fluid interior nature I mean, we've all experienced that we can be in a physical place But our mind can be taking us elsewhere and sometimes we are rudely abruptly dragged back to the present It's that experience of Real life, the way life is experienced by individuals that is at the absolute heart of what modernism is trying to replicate.

Maiya: I think that's a really insightful point, Joe, and I actually think it's worth moving to the second stanza and the opening lines of that second stanza to really illustrate [00:11:00] that, and I'll just read them for the benefit of listeners. What are the roots that clutch? What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?

Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you only know a heap of broken images. I really want to zoom in here. On that sense of interiority that Joe was talking about, because what we have here If we consider time as having these kind of two phases, the external and the internal, or the self as having the external and the internal, here what we see is exactly what Eliot describes to us, broken images.

We have something that is rootless, has no branches, and is considered at its base stony rubbish. is an absolute and complete sense of fragmentation here, and what Eliot brings is almost that sense of, you know, this isn't a metaphor, isn't just a poetic description, this is a true moment at which he feels, [00:12:00] or the speaker feels, that, , society, selfhood has completely broken down, let's not forget this comes out of the wake of World War I, and the world had immeasurably changed.

People had never experienced the horrors and the trauma that came out of World War I. Ever before. And this was very much a poem written out of the birth of that. So I think it's really important to note that one of the reasons that Eliot is so successfully able to, transfer the speaker's voice between different individuals, is because he doesn't root himself in one singular, voice.

Joe: I think that's absolutely right. And I think that it's impossible for us to understand what modernism is and why modernism comes to be. And again, I think,, when listeners and readers look back a hundred years later, it can sometimes feel kind of abstract. Why did this group of writers,, the likes of Joyce and Eliott and Virginia Woolf and others, , why did they have this great deviation [00:13:00] from literature that had come before them?

Well, as Maia mentioned, the early 20th century was a time of absolute change, fundamental societal change, whether that's due to the first world war, whether that's due to the sort of the fragmentary nature of British empire and other empires, whether that's to do with technological development, the world was changing at a rate that people couldn't comprehend and people couldn't deal with.

The old paradigms, whether they be scientific, political, social, were changing. you think about the first world war, and you think about things like the Russian revolution. The world was in a constant state of flux. And what modernism seeks to do is reflect, but also elevate that flux to be what it is.

So, what modernism is trying to do is reflect that state of flux, that state of transition. And Maiya mentioned the word fragment earlier on. And fragmentation is the absolute beating heart of what literary modernism is. You know, Ezra Pound, who we're going to talk about later on, because he's a hugely influential figure both in the movement, but also in this poem in particular. [00:14:00] Ezra Pound once used a phrase that became the maxim for modernism, and that phrase was, Make it new. And what we have in this poem, but also in modernism more generally, is that desire to make it new. And it's worth unpicking that phrase in a bit more detail, because Make something new. It's different to the phrase make it new because the it in that phrase already exists. You are taking something it is already in the world and transforming it rather than creating something independent of that which already exists. So what this poem , is a kind of collage of the Western world. I mean, there are other influences that go beyond the Western world as well.

You know, there is a reference to Sanskrit and there are Hindu elements to this poem, but largely we can view this poem as a collage of influences from Western civilization. And , I was making a list in preparation of this episode and,, the absolutely overwhelming nature of these influences, , I think is worthy of kind of notice. I think it's worth noting, for example, there's a [00:15:00] short list as I made, you've got Ovid's Metamorphoses, you've got the Fisher King that I mentioned, Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer, the works of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Edmund Spenser, Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Tennyson, more recent writers like Aldous Huxley, I mean, the list goes on and on.

This is such a dense collage of different voices, different influences. And like I said, it also moves to different narrators, different languages. And it is the desire to build something out of that, which already exists, to take existing components and make them into something that is distinct from what they were originally that underpins this poem and what it's trying to do. 

So just taking a slightly broader view, we've been looking at a couple of specific sections, but It's worth remembering that, obviously, like every piece of literature, you can read this in a linear fashion, but Maiya and I are taking a relatively loose look at this poem, because it's not a text where linearity is necessarily your friend or your ally. the poem is so difficult to follow, it moves voices so often, the different [00:16:00] sections don't necessarily relate to one another in a cohesive way that Maiya and I are taking a more abstract view of the poem. Of course, if you're reading it, All 434 lines of it, and you want to read it start to finish, that's a perfectly good way of looking at it, but don't be afraid if you'd rather look at each section individually, if you'd rather change the orders of the sections. The important thing with a lot of modernist poetry is to try and experience the reading of it, rather than necessarily understand everything that you read. This is about experiencing the poem on a slightly more kind of emotive level. Listen to the sounds. It's a really fascinating blend of very formal language, very technical language, different languages, alongside some quite basic, some quite, childish moments.

I mean, it's not quite, Joyce's Ulysses, which, relies quite heavily at times on phonetic fart jokes but there are elements of this poem that are nonetheless feel at odds with this 20th century masterpiece that it's often held up as because it does delve in the silly and the childish at times.

[00:17:00] Jumping right to the end of the poem now. This is very Bergsonian of us. That final stanza, which uses this nursery rhyme, London Bridge is Falling Down, is one of those wonderful moments that modernism throws up, whereby you have something that is rooted in the silly, the trivial, the innocent, and yet portrays something larger. It hints at a darker truth behind a kind of trivial, childish exterior.

But Maiya, what do you think about that?

Maiya: It's great that you mentioned the London line there, because it was actually what I wanted to focus on from the end of that first section. Eliot does an amazing job, of really situating the reader in London itself. Setting is incredibly important when it comes to analysing, the mood of this piece.

Now, London Bridge is Falling Down, as Joe mentioned, is a well known nursery rhyme. And London Bridge is Falling Down is often almost a playground chant. 

There are games based around it, it becomes a sort of very silly, quite happy, quite funny way of actually discussing the [00:18:00] multiple times that the real, true London Bridge has collapsed, been attacked, burnt down, been broken down,

It's a really Interesting thing to mention when you're talking about the decay of society because, again, we have a very serious situation that is being made light of. And what I think , is really incredible, actually, about the way that Eliot negotiates the kind of landscape of London is the final stanza of this first section of the poem, where he says, This unreal city.

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many. I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Now, Joe and I have talked in previous podcast episodes about pathetic fallacy. And pathetic fallacy is when the weather of a location or a setting reflects the mood of the people.

What I find here [00:19:00] is that Eliot almost reverses this, and instead, the mood of the people is what creates the weather. You have those protracted sighs, short and infrequent, and you can feel, even when I'm saying it now, the kind of heaviness and the thickness of those breaths.

And that is what is feeding into the brown fog of winter dawn. That is what is making that line feel heavy. And that repetition of so many, again, adds to this sense of weight. I think it's a really brilliant way of traversing kind of typical expectations of London that, we see throughout literature that are mechanical and industrial and the fog seems to just be part of the landscape.

But here, by using the attitude and the physical breaths of the people, he is physically pulling out, almost that soulless mood that seems to encapsulate the nation. But Joe, what do you think about those last few lines?

Joe: Well, I'm so glad you mentioned the description of the unreal city, because that's actually [00:20:00] another one of these references that we've been talking about, because that is taken from a Charles Baudelaire poem, the very famous French symbolist poet of the 19th century. By taking that description, which in Baudelaire is about Paris and making it about London, on the one hand, again, you're doing that thing that the poem is doing, which is it's blurring temporal and geographical distance. Things that are far away, both in terms of having happened a long time ago, but also having happened a long way away in terms of miles. Those distances, geographical and temporal, are very easily transcended in this poem. And that's the way that we experience the world. We can remember a faraway place and make it feel imminent, make it feel immediate.

We can remember something that happened decades ago in some cases, and yet it feels immediately palpable. This is Eliot making light, sort of belittling. the realities of geography and time, because actually he can make these things feel immediate. And I love what you were saying about the reverse pathetic fallacy there, the idea that rather than the external [00:21:00] world kind of foreshadowing something about our internal experience, subverting that by almost having these figures kind of The world emanates out from them. And I think, A, that's a wonderful way of summarising modernism, this idea that it's the internal that matters. I'm sure Eliot would be very pleased with that description. The idea that it's kind of emanating from the internal experience of these characters and it's a lovely democratization of that trope that I mentioned from the Fisher King. This idea that important people in society, kings, rulers, have shaped fabric of the nations they rule is not new.

I mean, this is a very well established literary trope. We see it in Shakespeare's plays all the time. For example, when Macbeth subverts the normal rule of law by becoming king in Shakespeare's tragedy, the nation of Scotland appears to disintegrate around him because he is not the rightful king. What we have in Eliot's poem, though, is that it's not about a single person. That's shaping the world around them. 

It's more about the fact that society [00:22:00] itself, there is an internal decay, there is an internal sense of. corruption that is emanating out into the world and this decaying barren landscape that the poem evokes is a reflection in many ways of the feeling that society was disintegrating at the beginning of the 20th century, the war, the Spanish influenza, which is really important....

. We haven't mentioned yet. , millions of people dead as a result of the war and the Spanish influenza. Revolutions happening. Old monarchies being overthrown. This world felt so fragile and that fragility is imbued into the landscape of this time.

Maiya: Now, Joe, here I'm just going to jump ahead a little bit, because as you said, we have so much to talk about in this poem, and we're not even past the first section yet. So I do want to jump quickly into this second section, which is called A Game of Chess. And there's really only one thing that I want to drill into here, Which is the use of voice.

So in a game of chess, we have a few alternating [00:23:00] voices, but primarily we understand it to be an almost stream of consciousness narrative. And here we have the multiple speakers considering a variety of different things. However, there is one consistent voice here. And that is a totally capitalised interjection which says, hurry up, please, it's time.

Not just once or twice, but five times. Now, I have always considered this voice to almost sit outside of the text. Not solely for the fact that when you read it on a page, the capitalization really makes it stand out and stand apart from the rest of the text. But also for the fact that when you enter a stream of consciousness narrative, You are consistently at the present moment, so to be told to hurry up and that your time is running out is a really unique position to be in. Stream of consciousness tends to not really have an end. And if it does have an end, it finds a very natural one, either by someone else starting a conversation [00:24:00] or the singular person deciding that they want to stop. Here, hurry up, please, it's time, Increases in its intensity before finally the speaker says, Okay, goodnight Bill, goodnight Lou.

Wishes their loved ones a final moment. But Joe, I'd love to know Have you considered this to be perhaps a religious voice from outside the text? Is this the writer almost stopping himself? Is this Pound potentially, interjecting a little bit?

Joe: What a fascinating question and the kind of central conceit of this section is that this is a last call at the bar. Effectively, this is a barman saying, right guys, time to clear out. Please go home. And yet, as Maiya has alluded to, there is just so much going on here. So your mention of pound, I think, is a fascinating one.

And this relates to one of the central themes that you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, which is This poem does not come out of a single poet. Now, Pound is hugely important. Yes, T. S. Elia is the author of this poem, but as we've already mentioned, [00:25:00] I mean, the number of co authors that you could almost give credit to because of all the references within it is incredibly long, but Ezra Pound, who I'm sure we'll get to in an episode in his own right, a troubling but ultimately fascinating figure in 20th century literature, he was instrumental in the crafting this poem.

He edited it and we have many copies of pages with his notes and it's worth noting that one of the things he stressed above all else was about condensing the poem. He cut out vast swathes of this poem and you can almost hear him saying, come on, , T. S. Eliot, get to the point, hurry up, move on. We need to move past this, and so I wonder whether the lines are a kind of playful nod to the fact that one of Pound's kind of most consistent pieces of advice for T. S. Eliot was to get a move on, cut this out, you don't need this section, etc. But, I mean, these lines seem quite innocuous. Hurry up, it's time, is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the most Moving or poetic or stunning line ever and yet they have their own [00:26:00] afterlife.

It's a sign of the richness of this poem. , Anne Sexton, the confessional poet, has a poem called Hurry up, please, it's time, which is all about mortality and all about the impending doom that follows. And I think taking lots of great poems might offer up a line that becomes the title of another work, or the title of a film, or the epigraph for a novel. It feels almost like you could pick any line from The Waste Land and you can find something in it. It is so dense. It is so multifaceted. And the fact that Anne Sexton chose this line, which is, seemingly quite innocuous in the context of this poem, and she felt that was resonant enough to inspire an entire poem, I think is absolutely testament to Eliot's quality as a writer, as well as his kind of broader influence on 20th century literature.

Maiya: I do almost feel as if it's Perhaps more directed at the reader sometimes, because as you enter that stream of consciousness, you begin to feel a little comfortable. You begin to feel familiar with [00:27:00] the poem, you understand where the voices are coming from, the fact that it's meant to be fragmented.

And I almost want to say that in some ways this is also Eliot disrupting the reader on purpose. If we skip ahead to the third section, Eliot actually considers himself, or the speaker considers himself, to be a prophetic figure, calling himself Tiresias. Now Tiresias, for listeners who aren't aware, was a Greek prophetic figure. Tiresias, Although he is a physically blind person, has the ability to see into the future, has the ability to predict and cast visions. So I think it's a fascinating choice from Eliot to almost self describe as this person with the ability to The future, because of course this is a turning point not just in everyday life, but for modernism in poetry, as Joe mentioned , this is almost a manifesto. I find it almost a little bit self [00:28:00] reverent here.

That Eliot chooses to almost embody, this mythological figure who had power and foresight and use it to, cast his own aspersions on the modern day. I think it's just, it's so interesting and I can't quite pinpoint if It's meant to be self referential and a little bit ironic, or if it's meant to be purposeful, what do you reckon?

Joe: I think there's always a playfulness to what Eliot is doing with these references. I think when you read a poem like this, you have to balance The gravity of some of the implications of the references he's making against their sheer ridiculousness at times. I mean, there is a playfulness to what he's doing here. And just to zoom out again slightly, the section we're talking about here, section 3, is titled The Fire Sermon. Right there, you have an allusion to Buddhism, because the Buddha gave a kind of a lesson that has become known as The Fire Sermon, which effectively boils down to the idea that everything around us is symbolically on fire, and if in order to achieve liberation, [00:29:00] we have to disassociate from the world around us.

Well, by aligning himself with a very serious set of religious teachings, And yet also aligning himself with completely different canon in, the ancient Greek mythology and Tiresias and he's a figure in the Greek underworld. He's already playing with notions of what do I believe in? Do I believe in either?

Do I believe in neither? I think there is a playfulness there. But in terms of your broader point around how much we should read into these classical references in particular, I think the influence of Ulysses is hugely strong here. And Ulysses, for any listeners who aren't aware, is James Joyce's very famous novel published in the same year as this poem. Ulysses is the Latin name for the Greek hero Odysseus, and that novel is doing many things, but on one level is a retelling of Homer's Odyssey. Except it takes a ten year journey home from Troy that Odysseus undertook, and it transforms it, again, this idea of making it new, it transforms it into a single day.

In the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the early [00:30:00] 20th century. So one of the things that's worth noting is that Joyce and Eliot were confidants. They were friends. They exchanged letters. Eliot had actually read. large sections of Ulysses before he wrote this poem. It wasn't published until 1922, but he had been reading sections of it in 1921.

So that ability to go back into the ancient world and take the sections that suit you without feeling beholden to reflect the stories accurately, I think is something he's definitely borrowing from Joyce. 

Just while we're on the subject of Tiresias, I think this is another really interesting example of the sheer variety and kind of complexity of what Eliot is doing here. So Tiresias is not only a blind seer from the ancient world like Maiya was talking about, he's also famous in those stories for , his transformation from man to woman, which is also mentioned specifically in this poem where he's described as old man with a wrinkled female breast.

And again, we have that sense of something that is one thing while simultaneously [00:31:00] being another. And this sense of contrast, but also this sense of merging of two distinct things is absolutely crucial to understanding this poem. And, Maiya's mentioned already, we were talking about this before the episode as well, about how this poem is on the one hand really focused on water.

evocation of the Fisher King is very related to running water, to rivers, we get London Bridge, which of course is crossing Thames. And yet, this section is called The Fire Sermon. And once more, we have doing one thing while doing several other things simultaneously. By associating these running waters, these rivers, with fire, he's evoking not only the Bible in which the book of Daniel talks about a river of fire, but he's also evoking the Greek underworld, which is where Tiresias features in Homer's Odyssey. And in the underworld, according to Greek mythology, there are several rivers that run into the underworld, the most famous one being the Styx. But there was another one called the Phlegethon, or the Phlegethon, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, [00:32:00] which again is a river of fire. And it's just, I mean, I'm overawed by the sheer density of this poem.

There are Countless different voices. Countless different poetic styles. We would think of this largely as being a free verse poem. Apparently Eliot himself hated that idea that it was a free verse poem. Because he was wanting more credit for the fact that in this poem you have blank verse.

. You have dramatic monologues. You have Petrarchan sonnets. You have blank verse. You have internal rhyme. It is the world and the thousands of years of the Western Canon made manifest in feels like a long term.

But when you consider all of the things it's paying tribute to and reimagining, it's actually relatively condensed. Every line is paying tribute to or reworking, reconfiguring something.

Maiya: I couldn't agree more. Each mention of water, especially within this third section that we're looking at stands as almost, I want to say, more of a reflection as to what is truly on fire here, which is [00:33:00] the individual, which is the society, which are these much larger and slightly more self concerned moments of the poem.

I just want to push forward to the end of this third section, where we have the mention of multiple locations in London and beyond, and we have this stanza where Eliot is talking about Margate Sands.

Margate is a beach in the UK, and of course, as we were saying, Eliot was living in the UK, has probably travelled to this beach and seen it. However, what he does here is mythologise it. And it seems odd to us, you know, Joe and I are both from the UK, it seems like a holiday destination, or somewhere that you go on a day trip.

But here, He says, On Margate Sands, I can connect nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands, my people humble people who expect nothing. La la to Carthage, then I came. Burning, burning, burning. Here, The Fire [00:34:00] Sermon is not being preached from these peaceful, calming waters.

It is being preached from the individual. It is the individual who is arriving at these places on fire. And here we don't understand fire to be something more akin to a phoenix rising from the ashes, a symbol of rebirth or renewal, here it is a symbol of destruction.

Joe: I'm so glad that you wanted to zoom in on these lines because they are a bit of a modernist nerd like me, especially somebody who is, very interested in Joyce's Ulysses. These lines jump out to me straight away for reasons that I'll come to in a moment. But just on the biography. in 1921, Eliot was diagnosed with a nervous disorder and he was prescribed three months off work and he went to Margate. There's a blue plaque to him, I believe, there. And he spent some time writing what would go on to become this poem while in Margate, recuperating. I don't know if writing a poem like this would necessarily be good for somebody if they were having time off work prescribed, but, to each their own. But those [00:35:00] lines, On Margate Sands, I can connect nothing with nothing. To me this is a really clear kind of evocation of one of the pivotal early descriptions in Joyce's Ulysses in which The character Stephen Dedalus who in many ways is Joyce's kind of alter ego is in the city of Dublin And he's walking along the beach and he asks himself am I walking into eternity?

Along sandy mount strand and I think there is something in both of these modernist masterpieces about the seaside about the kind of liminal space between land and sea that speaks to this experience of Creation because every wave that goes out and comes in is somehow similar to the last one and yet unique and distinct There is something about the churn something primordial about the coastline, which I think is really linked to this idea of creation but crucially Whereas joyce's evocation of the seaside in ulysses is about eternity.

It's about vast expanses It's about expansion without limits. Eliot [00:36:00] is about contraction. It's about absence. I can connect nothing with nothing. And despite situating moments of their modernist masterpieces in very similar locations, these beachside scenes, they draw completely opposite conclusions.

And I just, I find that so fascinating.

Maiya: really glad you brought up that kind of division between the land and the sea, and it's not something I'd really considered actually walking into this poem, but as you were talking then it made me think that, as the tides come in and out, as you have this sense of repetition, it really stands to reason that within this poem, it really represents the ambiguity of time.

I'm looking at the fourth section of this poem, which is by far the shortest section. In the whole poem, it's only ten lines. And there is a discussion based around the title, Death by Water, in which the current Reflects the person a current undersea picked his bones and whispers as he rose and fell he passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the [00:37:00] whirlpool and it really reminds me of something we talked about Episodes and episodes ago now, 

I believe it was on Maya Angelou episode. I did some incredible reading when I was studying for my master's and One of the authors I wrote on quite extensively was Christina Sharpe who wrote, a critical text called In the Wake. And in that she reasons that, bodies that are lost in the sea are constantly recycled.

They are both present and past and future as well because their chemicals are constantly being reused. And stanzas like this, mentions of water like this, especially when we're talking about modernist poets who consider time in such a nonlinear way, it really makes me think that in this poem, each moment at which, the ocean breaches the land becomes a representation of time, either past or present encroaching on the individual.

And Eliot does a fantastic job of making, you know, the past moment very immediate or the future [00:38:00] prediction, very unsettling. So although it doesn't seem that in this poem there is, a running thread, I think that movement of water, that constant return to ocean or river or lake or underworld or whatever it is, becomes the kind of central point of this poem, becomes the crux, because 

you are constantly being pushed out by the tide, and then pulled back in, and then pushed out again. You are constantly unsettled, but by being unsettled, you are also held.

Joe: I think there's no better way to back up your point there than by giving a small reading from Eliot himself, because one thing that we haven't mentioned yet but is nonetheless crucial to understanding this poem is that Eliot was, in addition to being a poet, was also a critical voice, and just three years prior to the publication of this poem he published one of the most influential essays ever written on poetry. And it was called tradition. And the individual talents, but just something that he wrote that I think is really applicable to what Maiya was talking about here, which is that what he's able to [00:39:00] do and what lots of modernists were able to do is reach back into the past and bring it abruptly into the present.

And sometimes it merges, but sometimes it clashes. And in both cases, there's something to be learned there. And he wrote in this essay, and I quote. The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show. When you are in a moment in time, it is very hard to see it as others will go on to see it in the future. When we look back at the past. We have a kind of far broader, viewpoint. We have a broader perspective. We can view not only the events that happened, but also their consequences in ways that people couldn't possibly know what the consequences were going to be at the time. So our perception of the past is not simply a retelling of events because it's a retelling of events as mediated by the present. So, we are inevitably wiser than those who came before us, just as people after us will be wiser than us.

Not on an individual level, it's not to say that people in the [00:40:00] past weren't as clever as people from the present, but we all have the benefit of hindsight when we look back. Even if we pretend to have it in our contemporary moment, we don't. Only people in the future will know the overall effects and consequences of the actions that we have taken.

Undertake in the present, but it's that relationship between things that have been and things that are happening now Laying them out almost simultaneously

And that extract from the essay, I think, illustrates really interestingly the fact that Eliot, like many writers, but particularly modernist writers, are interested in the past. They're interested in not only reflecting and retelling the past, but by reimagining the past and the present. Because the context of events, the context of characters shapes those characters and those events themselves.

And when you change the context, you change the outcome and vice versa. But, Maiya, when we look back at Eliot and we try to sum this episode up, where would you like to finish off and is there anything that you'd like to focus on with regard to this relationship between past and present events?

Maiya: To be honest,Joe, I think what I really want to [00:41:00] impress on listeners, readers, whoever is kind of exploring Eliot's poem for the first time, is that I think on a first read, because this poem is so lengthy and it has so many voices, For many readers, not only can it feel a little bit daunting and, that you're struggling to understand it, but also it can feel a little bit bleak.

I think there is a tendency to focus on the fragmentation and the disorder of the poem and extrapolate that across the lessons you take from the poem. And I find that so often, this last section is really ignored. And there's really only three words here that I want to focus on.

The three words here that I want to focus on come from the Upanishads, which are written in Sanskrit. And the Sanskrit effectively conveys, , moral or spiritual concepts in order to lead your life by. And the three words that are mentioned here by Eliot in What the Thunder Said, this final section.

Are data, which means to [00:42:00] give, it's about generosity and selflessness, whether that comes in the form of kindness or charity. Dayadhvam, which effectively translates as sympathy or compassion, it speaks to the suffering that we've endured through the whole of the rest of Eliot's poem. He takes a moment and a break to offer just a moment of understanding.

And the final and most critical one, in my view, Damayata, which represents control, or often self control. In Eliot's world that he has constructed in The Waste Land, the individual is someone that is so fragmented that they become a single voice

in a crowd of thousands. We as a reader travel on a journey through the voices of hundreds of people in this poem. And yet here, self control. is one of the final words of the poem. Followed by the chant, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, which translates as [00:43:00] peace.

To end a poem of this scale, of this length, that talks about ruin and decay and destruction, With a moment of solace, and especially one drawn not from a western religion, I think is such a fascinating choice.

, But Joe, when it comes to closing a poem like this, one that is so grand in scale, by ending it with, the repetition of words that represent,, Peace and solace and control and all of these, moral precepts to live one's life by. How do you think that impacts the reception of this poem as a whole?

Do you think it falls flat as compared to everything we've talked about throughout the whole poem? Or do you think it actually stands to reason that this is the strength of the poem?

Joe: It's a really good question. I think my answer has probably changed over the years. , I first read this poem, I think, earlier in my undergraduate degree. So we're coming up for, I don't want to necessarily, , reveal how old I am, but we're coming up for nearly a decade since then. I think when I first encountered this poem, [00:44:00] I was probably unable to look beyond its bleakness, its barrenness, its emptiness, its darkness. Upon rereading it, I can't help but be moved by these final lines and not just , the final kind of declaration you've mentioned, but if I could just throw it back to two or three lines prior to that. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. I think when I first read The Waste Land and Eliot, it's very easy to get caught in kind of the verbosity, the kind of slightly know it all y nature of the poem.

It's so eloquent but also so dripping in references and winks at the reader and it's so all knowing that it's hard to portray the writer as anything other than an arrogant voice of, Mastery, in many ways. And yet there's a real humility to these final lines. These fragments I have shored against my ruins is not a declaration of mastery over the past. It's a really humble declaration of how much the past means to the speaker. What they're saying is, I didn't make this [00:45:00] world disintegrate around us, and I'm desperately trying to cling on to everything I can that makes us human. And when I read The last few lines with that kind of frame of reference in mind. I find it uplifting. I find it really quite profoundly moving. This is a poem about how much culture and art and history and storytelling means to us as a human race. One day it will end. We don't know whether it will end by our own hand or by some other kind of geological power. Of course, like I mentioned, in the wake of the First World War and the Spanish Influenza, these questions of Absolute death and destruction were not abstract.

They were very palpable. Lots of people. It's not a coincidence. This is only three years after the publication. of W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming, which we talked about last series, which offers a similarly apocalyptic vision for the world. People and artists were asking themselves, what do we do in the face of our own destruction? And Eliot's answer to that is, I tell myself stories. I go back to the past, I go back to moments from history, [00:46:00] moments from literature, nursery rhymes that I can remember, holidays that I took to the beach, and I desperately cling on to them. And I find something really beautiful about that. And I think if I could just close out the episode by reading again a small extract from Eliot's essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, because I think it underpins this poem, but also the way that I think a lot of us should think about the past and think about our own place in this story that we're in. The exact fact is, no poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone. You must see him for contrast and comparison. Among the dead and I guess the biggest compliment that I can pay to Eliot Is the one I think that he would want which is that he has taken his place among those generations of deceased [00:47:00] geniuses and that he Rightly finds himself alongside the very best of them 

Maiya: Well, thanks, Joe. I think that's a really beautiful way to close out today's episode. I'm sure we could have talked for many many more hours on this poem and the rest of Eliot's work and maybe we will in the future.

So if anyone's listening and would like to hear about Eliot or about this poem Please do let us know. You can email us directly at beyondtheverse@PoemAnalysis.com and you can sign up for a Poetry+ membership to get all the info about this and more.

Next week. We will be talking about Dylan Thomas's. Do not go gentle into that. Good night, 

But for now, it's goodbye from me.

And goodbye from me and the whole team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+.