In brief
T. S. Eliot’s poem has no plot, no single speaker and no agreed subject. In about 430 lines, five sections and six or seven languages it moves through a Bavarian summer, a fortune-teller’s parlour, a London commuter crowd, a stifling marriage, a pub at closing time, a typist’s joyless seduction, a drowned sailor and a thunderstorm gathering over a dry India. It begins by reversing Chaucer, “April is the cruellest month”, and ends in Sanskrit.
It came out in October 1922, the year of Ulysses, and it did for English verse what Joyce’s novel did for prose: it made older ways of proceeding look like a choice. It is at once a poem of collective breakdown after the Great War, a private poem of marital misery and nervous collapse, and a collaboration, because nearly half of what its author drafted was removed, much of it by Ezra Pound.
The argument
The usual reading comes from Eliot’s own first note. A land lies barren because its king is wounded: the Fisher King legend as Jessie Weston presented it, with modern London as the blighted country.
That reading is true and insufficient. The poem has no quest and nobody asks any question. It records states of mind with an accuracy that seems almost clinical: the fear of a closed room, the sense that other people are unreal, “a heap of broken images” in place of a culture. The nearest thing to a conclusion is “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”, which describes the poem’s method and admits its failure.
The view taken here is that the poem’s claim about civilisation is its weakest part and its sound is its strongest. The contempt for the typist and the clerk is real, and the anti-Jewish note is there in the drafts. What survives is the fact that a nervous American could hear the dead in the speech of the living, and could set a pub landlord’s closing call beside Dante without either being diminished.
The five parts
I. The Burial of the Dead
The title comes from the Anglican service. Spring hurts because it wakes what would rather stay asleep. A woman called Marie remembers sledding as a girl, a voice offers “fear in a handful of dust”, a girl comes back from a hyacinth garden, Madame Sosostris deals her cards, and the crowd flows over London Bridge, which Eliot calls “Unreal City”. The last speaker asks a friend whether the corpse in his garden has begun to sprout.
II. A Game of Chess
The section has two rooms. In the first, a rich woman among glittering objects demands that a silent man answer her. In the second, a pub voice tells of Lil, who has aborted a child and lost her teeth, while the barman keeps calling “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME”.
III. The Fire Sermon
The longest section takes its title from the Buddha. Spenser’s river is summoned by a list of the litter it no longer carries, Mr Eugenides proposes a weekend at the Metropole, and the blind Tiresias watches the typist and “the young man carbuncular” go through their routine. Three Thames daughters tell of their ruin, the last of them on Margate Sands, where she “can connect” nothing. The fire burns on, in a line of Buddha crossed with Augustine.
IV. Death by Water
The section has ten lines. “Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead” is all that remains of a much longer sea story. The brevity is the surprise.
V. What the Thunder Said
Drafted at Lausanne, this is the part most readers come back to. A march through waterless rock, an extra walker, cities falling, a ruined chapel, and at last the thunder’s syllable, which the Upanishad expands to “Datta” (give), “Dayadhvam” (sympathise) and “Damyata” (control). The poem closes on a repeated word Eliot glosses as the peace which passeth understanding. A reader cannot tell whether it has come.
The voices
The early title for the first two parts was He Do the Police in Different Voices, a line from Dickens about a boy who reads the newspaper aloud. The method is ventriloquism: an aristocrat, a clairvoyant, a pub gossip, a Thames girl, each in a few lines, with no announcer. Between them come scraps of Wagner, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Dante and a children’s rhyme.
“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag” is a hit of 1912 with its syllable stretched to fit, and it shows what Eliot was doing with everything else: he sets a phrase where it cannot quite belong, and the misfit does the work.
Pound’s cuts
Eliot wrote most of the poem in the autumn of 1921, after a nervous collapse and three months’ leave from Lloyds Bank. He wrote some fifty lines in a shelter on Margate Sands, showed a version to Pound in Paris in November, and finished a first draft in Lausanne while under the care of Dr Vittoz. In January 1922 he brought Pound nineteen pages. Pound went through them with a pencil, wrote “verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it” on one, and called himself the poem’s midwife, or sage homme.
Here is what went. Eliot himself dropped the opening scene, a drunken Boston night out. Pound removed the long couplets in imitation of Pope that opened “The Fire Sermon”, which followed a society woman called Fresca to the “needful stool”; he told Eliot he could not parody Pope unless he could write better verse than Pope, “and you can’t”. He cut stanzas from the typist episode, a set of poems on a figure called Bleistein, and almost all of a long New England cod-fishing voyage in “Death by Water”. When a deflated Eliot offered to lose Phlebas too, Pound told him to keep the ten lines. He refused the Heart of Darkness epigraph as not weighty enough, and refused “Gerontion” as a prelude. He wrote that even at this length it was “the longest poem in the English langwidge”.
Eliot later dedicated the poem to Pound as “il miglior fabbro”, the better craftsman, a phrase from Dante. The draft is a satirist’s poem, twice the size. Pound removed the connecting tissue and with it nearly everything that told the reader what to think.
The 1971 facsimile
For half a century those pages were thought lost. Eliot sent the drafts to John Quinn, the New York lawyer who had negotiated for him, in thanks. After Quinn’s death in 1924 they passed to his sister, whose daughter found them in storage in the early 1950s and sold them privately to the New York Public Library in 1958. The news only reached Valerie Eliot in April 1968, three years after her husband’s death.
Her edition, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, came out from Faber in 1971, with the handwriting of three people visible on the page. Richard Ellmann and Edmund Wilson reviewed it within months in the New York Review of Books. It showed a poem assembled and reduced, more personal and more American than anyone had supposed. Vivienne Eliot marked the nerves passage “Wonderful”, and at her request a line about ivory men was removed. Eliot restored it from memory in 1960, thirteen years after her death.
Eliot’s notes
The poem first appeared without notes, in The Criterion on 16 October 1922 and in The Dial a few days later. The notes were added to the Boni & Liveright book that December, largely because the poem was too short to fill a volume. They include learned jokes, a misremembered Antarctic expedition and a reference to Miss Jessie Weston’s book, which he says will “elucidate the difficulties of the poem” better than his notes.
They were then taken for the key. Tiresias, says one note, is “the most important personage in the poem”. Readers chased Weston and Frazer as if solving a crossword. In a lecture of 1956 Eliot said the notes had prompted “the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship”. He did not withdraw them, and they have become one more voice in the poem.
Eliot and Joyce
James Joyce was present at this poem’s making. Eliot, assistant editor of The Egoist under Harriet Shaw Weaver, was reading Ulysses in instalments from 1918, and in June that year was calling Joyce “the best living prose writer”. In August 1920 he carried a parcel from Pound to Paris with Wyndham Lewis; Joyce undid the string to find a pair of old brown shoes, a charity that seems to have mortified him. Lewis told the story in his memoirs; Eliot told Sydney Schiff that Joyce was “a quiet but rather dogmatic man”.
In spring 1921 Eliot read “Oxen of the Sun” and “Circe” in manuscript, and wrote to Joyce that he thought them superb and then: “I wish, for myself, that I had not read it.” Months later he was writing his own poem. Its layered voices and its parallels with old stories owe much to that reading, and the connection reaches into the drafts. Fresca was heading for the same place as Leopold Bloom, and Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, sums up Pound’s advice neatly: Pope had done the couplets better, “and Joyce the defecation”, so there was no point in another round. Virginia Woolf’s diary remembers Eliot, for once “rapt, enthusiastic”, asking how anyone could write again after the last chapter.
The fullest statement is “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” in The Dial of November 1923, a year after the poem. Eliot called the novel “the most important expression” of the age, and said the Homeric parallel was no “amusing dodge”. It was what he called the mythical method, with “the importance of a scientific discovery”: a way of giving shape to “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”. Most readers since have seen that he was also describing his own poem. The trouble is that it fits Joyce better than Eliot. Bloom’s Homer gives him dignity, while Eliot’s Grail mostly reproaches the people in the pub.
Joyce’s response was mixed. According to Helen Nutting’s diary, as Ellmann gives it, he said he had “never realised that Eliot was a poet”; a notebook entry has it that Eliot “ends idea of poetry for ladies”. In August 1925, waiting for an eye operation in Rouen, he sent Weaver a parody beginning “Rouen is the rainiest place”, and Finnegans Wake has its echoes, “wasteward” among them and the triple “Sandhyas!” that opens Book IV. Eliot, who had moved to Faber in 1925, printed Joyce’s new work in The Criterion that year, and Finnegans Wake came out under the Faber imprint in 1939.
The people
Tiresias
Tiresias, the blind prophet from Ovid who has lived as both sexes, watches the typist’s evening. He is better read as one more voice than as the mind in which the rest meet.
Lil and the typist
Both are working women in sexual trouble, seen from outside. The sympathy in these passages is real and so is the disdain.
Phlebas
Phlebas is the drowned sailor who was once tall and handsome. All the voyage material was cut down to him, and he receives the poem’s gentlest address to the reader.
The people behind it
Vivienne Eliot is the frightened speaker of “A Game of Chess”, or at least its source. She died in an asylum in 1947. Marie is drawn from Countess Marie Larisch. Scholars identify the hyacinth girl with Emily Hale, whom Eliot had loved at Harvard, and some hear in the poem’s grief Jean Verdenal, a Paris friend killed in 1915.
What is free, and where
The legal position differs by country. Published in 1922, the poem has been in the public domain in the United States since the start of 1998, and Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks both carry it there, with the notes. Eliot died in January 1965. In the UK, the EU and other countries with a term of life plus seventy years the poem remains in copyright until the end of 2035. Gutenberg itself warns readers outside the United States to check their own law. So the links here are legal for an American reader, and in Europe the honest course is to buy a cheap copy. Quotation is kept short for that reason.
The 1971 facsimile is in copyright everywhere. Its drafts appear here only in words other critics have quoted.
Readers and critics
Early opinion split: the Guardian called it waste paper; F. L. Lucas in the New Statesman allowed some good blank verse and nothing more. Conrad Aiken was moved and found it incoherent. William Carlos Williams believed it had set him, and American writing, back twenty years.
I. A. Richards praised it in 1926 for doing without belief. The New Critics then made it the central exhibit of modern poetry and treated the notes as a syllabus. The facsimile, then Lyndall Gordon’s biographies, moved attention to his private life. Lawrence Rainey’s work on how the poem was sold has shown how carefully it was launched: The Dial offered $150, Eliot took offence, and Quinn arranged a deal under which he also received its $2,000 prize. Lesley Wheeler argues that younger poets feel it far less. Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022) is a recent long account.
Afterlives
The poem’s techniques became common property, in Faulkner, in Orwell’s use of song and in much post-war verse; George Seferis put it into Greek in 1936. Parodies include H. P. Lovecraft’s “Waste Paper” and Wendy Cope’s limericks.
It also turned out to be a performance piece. Fiona Shaw’s solo reading, directed by Deborah Warner, played in New York in 1996 and returned at Wilton’s Music Hall in London in 2010. It proves that the poem’s voices are parts for an actor.
How to read it
- Hear it first. Read it aloud or find a recording, all the way through, without notes. It takes about twenty-five minutes, and understanding can wait.
- Read the notes second. Keep a raised eyebrow.
- Get a good edition. Lawrence Rainey’s The Annotated Waste Land (2005) gives the texts and sound commentary. Michael North’s Norton Critical Edition gathers the sources and reviews. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue’s The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2015) has everything, at length.
- Then read the drafts. Go to the facsimile last. Watching Pound’s pencil is the best lesson in editing there is.
Read next
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). The book Eliot wished he had not read, with the same mix of myth, city and pastiche, and much more kindness.
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899). The source of the epigraph Pound refused, and the same dead rivers.
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27). Memory and desire at several thousand times the length, with Sydney Schiff at the edge of both.
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943). The same poet two decades on, with a calm the earlier poem could only name in Sanskrit.