It's The 100th Anniversary of "The Waste Land"

“In ‘The Waste Land,’ I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying,” T. S. Eliot, who was born on this day in 1888, told an interviewer.https://t.co/o5Omp3dPqI

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) September 26, 2022

Let the amusing anecdotes fly.

I knew decades ago that Eliot dismissed his most famous poem as "a bit of rhythmic grumbling," mostly because it overshadowed the rest of his life and work, and he got heartily sick of it.  Everyone wanted to (and still does) crack it like a particularly intricate puzzle in order to get the "meaning" hidden somewhere inside.  It was the rise of literary studies as a kind of detective pursuit ("Find the meaning! Find it!") and Eliot fell into it, or fed it (depending on your point of view) with his odd and arcane poem.  But I'm here to converse with Anthony Lane's take on the poem; or maybe, more precisely, to discuss mine (briefly) and use Mr. Lane's essay as a foil.

Because you can read Mr. Lane's, if you like.  Where I want to start is with the absolute absence of any reference in any of the articles popping up in my Google feed (did I mention it's the 100th anniversary of this poem?) to Robert Browning.

That's right:  Mr. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The teller of the tale of the Pied Pier of Hamelin.  The neo-gothic romanticist of "Porphyria's Lover."  I'm getting closer to the reason I mention Mr. Browning, but that reason is another poem; and actually, the classification of poems themselves.

Poetry is the oldest form or literature, I used to tell my students in a literature class.  It began simply as a mnemonic device.  Some pattern to the words and lines (end rhyme came late to the game, so don't start there) made it easier to remember them, although remembering them exactly was not the point.  There was no text to score against, there was only the memory of the story, and the story was all.  The poet was the memory keeper, the explainer, the signifier of what was important (Beowulf's courage, strength, bravery; in the end his selflessness.  He travels to Heorot to show off, basically; but he stays to finish the job when he has to tackle Grendel's mother, as well; and that's a harder task.  When he returns home he refuses to take the crown until it is forced on him, and he dies defending his people when his warriors flee the danger of the dragon.  Of course by dying he leaves his people defenseless; but it was the neighboring tribes or the dragon, so....).  The poet kept these long poems in mind through patterns of speech we now identify as rhyme or meter.  We came along later and categorized and classified these things.  Much, much later.  We ossified it into set pieces.

And we divided poetry on the Greek terms:  lyric for poems expressing emotion (because the Greeks sang/chanted them to the music of the lyre.  Think of it as a Greek guitar, and you aren't far off.  Now if you suddenly think of James Taylor singing "Fire and Rain" ("Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone./Suzanne the plans they made put an end to you./I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song."), you aren't far off again.).  Narrative for; well, for everything else.  Narrative poems tell stories.  They may express or induce emotional responses (I have several emotional responses to "Beowulf"), but their purpose is to tell a story.  The purpose of a lyric poem is to express an emotion; or several.

Narrative is the grand category, the other side of the dividing line from lyric poetry.  But narrative poetry has categories within it, the grandest of them being the epic.  No need to detail the terms of that category:  we can settle for poems that tell a long story.  And until Robert Browning in Victorian England, those were the accepted categories of poems.  Then Browning invented a new one.

It's curious he doesn't get more credit for it.  Shakespeare invented the English sonnet, but his was just a stanza and meter variation on the Petrarchan; and it didn't really take.  English poets still primarily write Petrarchan sonnets, when they do (W.H. Auden's are some of the best in the language).  Browning, however, invented a new type of poem out of whole cloth, a poem so unique and different it created a new class of narrative poem.  Browning created the dramatic monologue.

"Dramatic" in part because Browning wanted to be a playwright; but he was a better poet than that.  Dramatic, too, because one of the elements of the dramatic monologue is dramatic irony.  That kind of irony is usually seen on stage:  one character reveals something the other characters don't know about; but the audience, watching invisibly and silently behind the "fourth wall," does.  That irony, that "we" know something "they" don't know, can fuel the tension of the plot until the climax, when all is finally revealed. Handled well, it can be thrilling and satisfying; handled poorly, it can be disastrous.  Browning was never very good as a playwright but at handling dramatic irony he is without peer.

"Monologue" is also a term that comes from the stage.  Plays don't have a narrator, someone who can explain the inner thoughts of a character to the reader/audience. (Even "Our Town's" narrator doesn't do that.)  When the playwright needs to clue the audience in, a monologue is used.  In "Othello," in the final scene of act I, Iago tells the audience what his plans are; that he will deceive everyone, including Roderigo who thinks he is Iago's partner in crime; and he will have Desdemona for his own.  It's a bit of dramatic irony, then, as we watch Iago lie to Othello and Cassio and Desdemona (who isn't fooled!) and Roderigo and work his treachery across the tragedy.

But the more famous Shakespearean monologues belong to "Hamlet," as the young prince tries to decide if he can commit regicide and parricide (well, by marriage) and...I'm sure there's a term for killing one's uncle, but you get the idea...all on the word of a ghost who may be his dead father, or may be a demon trying to torment him.  And do it in cold blood, no less. Hamlet's soliloquies, or monologues, are his inner thoughts as he wrestles with these dilemmas.  And here perhaps we should distinquish between the soliloquy, spoken by one character on stage alone, and the monologue, spoken by a character without interruption or intervention by another character.  The distinction, it occurs, is important in the case of a dramatic monologue, because ofen the narrator is not alone with his/her thoughts.

Browning's best (by far) dramatic monologue is "My Last Duchess."  It is a monologue, not a soliloquy (which, technically, "Porphyria's Lover" is).  There is a silent, anonymous audience of one to the Duke's tale:  "Will't please you sit and look at her?"  He reveals a painting of his last Duchess to this solitary viewer, and tells her story.  It becomes clear to the reader, and the viewer in the poem, that the Duke was pricked by his last wife's largeness of heart and kindness toward all, a kindness and beneficence he obviously doesn't share. Just as light reveals dark places, her shining example of a good person was too much for the Duke to bear, because he was outshone (one thinks, fleetingly, of Donald Trump, who can never bear to be publicly upstaged).  "...This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped at once."  Yes.  He executed her for making him feel bad about himself.

Having finished his story, he makes sure you get his meaning with one last reference to the painting:

There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

And now you, the reader, get the point of Browning's tale:  the silent audience of one is not mute; his statements are insignificant, they simply don't register on the Duke's ear.  It's all about him, and it always will be. The audience of one is an agent of the Count, sent to negotiate the last details of the terms of the dowry in preparation for the marriage of the Count's daughter to the Duke.  But the agent realizes now the Duke is a monster and if the Count loves his daughter at all, must call off this marriage before it's too late.  He tries to leave the Duke upstairs and rush down to get the Count's attention, but the Duke is oblivious to his concerns and quite sure he (the Duke) is being magnanimous to treat this servant as an equal:  "Nay, we'll go/Together down, sir."  And what does he speak of, after this unspeakable tale?  His art collection, to which he has already added his last Duchess.

Does the Duke realize what his monologue has revealed to us?  No.  And that's the dramatic irony.  We are left hoping the Count is warned in time, and equally left revolted by this self-involved and self-important monster.  This is an absolutely perfect example of the form:  we are left with a clear understanding of the Duke which he himself does not have and would never reveal to another if he did.

So there you have the two elements that set a narrative poem apart from a dramatic monologue.  But what does this have to do with "The Waste Land"?

Before that poem, Eliot was famous for his first long poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  It was a "modernist" poem, wandering somewhere between end rhyme (lots of couplets!) and free verse, but above all it was a brilliant revival of the dramatic monologue.  The narrator is Prufrock, not Eliot.  And he reveals his desires, his needs, his wants, his wishes, his failures and his despair precisely "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen".  He is the creature of his dissociated, discommuned age: "Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets/And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes/Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?"  He is also, at least within the frame of the dramatic monologue, self-aware: "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be". But even that revelation doesn't break the isenglass of the monologue, and he continues to soliloquize in part because he is the reverse of the Duke of Ferrara.  Prufrock is self-absorbed, too, but no one wants to talk to him.  The Duke is the stony center of his universe; Prufrock is the empty vacuum at the enter of his.

"Prufrock" may be a lyric expression of the emotions of T.S. Eliot; but it seems more reasonable to see him as a figure of the "modern man" when projectors were still "magic lanterns" and social life was tea and time spent in "a closed car" if it rained.  This is a description of a modern world leaving many people behind and outside the walls of human society, much as the Industrial Revolution did to English country villages 100 years before Eliot wrote his poem.  (I, too, can connect nothing with nothing.)  It's in the understanding of the poem that way, that we can see what Eliot was trying to do, and did, with "The Waste Land."  Especially if we keep in mind that Eliot's original title for the poem was a line from Dickens:  "He do the police in different voices."

Eliot tried his hand at plays, too, in the end.  They hardly rival Shakespeare; and, if anything, indicate the British desire to achieve the highwater mark of British letters:  playwright (i.e., Shakespeare).  Auden did the same, as did Yeats.  They are all better remembered as poets.  But before Eliot got to plays (and having fallen back on lyric poetry for the rest of his output), he tried his hand at expanding the dramatic monologue to cover all of Europe, and to capture the entirety of life between the wars that was European civilization and society.

So he goes back to Greece, he comes forward to patrons in an English pub discussing demobilization of the troops, he wanders through French and German and across the European map:

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind,

Wo weilest du?

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! 

It's no accident that the scene in the pub is introduced by:

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

In the middle of the monologue already drawing to a close ("What are you thinking?  What thinking? What?") that portrays the alienation between a husband and a wife (Eliot and Vivienne?  Many think so.).

And Margate sands; and Phlebas the Phoenician ("Who was once as young and fair as you") and Madame Sosostris with her "wicked pack of cards" bringing in the pseudo-mystical that the Victorians clung so tenaciously to even as they eradicated it from local culture with industrialization and "modernization" (AC Doyle created the absolutely scientifically minded Holmes, but clung absolutely to a belief in fairies, one aided by the very scientific advance of: photography.) to Carthage, to:

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

Some scenes call back to others:

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Which, to me, echoes the previous monologue by the wife to her husband.  

To India to the Thames to London Bridge falling down:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

 

                                    I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

Fragments shored against the ruins.  A personal expression? An historical one?  A cultural one?  A personal one?

I'm not here to give the poem a final meaning.  I find it interesting that Mr. Lake relates a reading of the poem by Frumious Bandersnatch (I jest in respect) accompanied by music, not of the lyre, but composed by Anthony Burgess, the novelist (and why didn't I know this music existed!??!).  Not sure about the instrumentation, but lacking full information seems appropriate to this poem.  If you see it was a deconstructed dramatic monologue, or perhaps more accurately as an exploded one, the sausage casing unable in the end to contain all the stuffing, it begins to fit together, and what is revealed in the dramatic irony is what we most work to conceal: i.e., the unity of "western civilization," the notion of a Europa somehow joined even as it constantly tries to fly apart (this was between the wars, after all; the notion of a peaceful Europe after the war to end all wars was just the wishful hope of those most tired of war.  It was never a reality.).  It’s a cacophony of voices trying to find, again, the one voice of history. But “history” is a moving target. The settled events of the past were once the chaos of the present. The more we look for certainty, the closer we are to chaos. Stability is built on the backs of people without voices or, especially in the case of the English, those unvoiced by foreign tongues. (Again, no accident the poem begins a childhood spent at the arch-duke’s in the mountains of Europe and ends by the banks of (perhaps?) the Thames "Fishing, with the arid plain behind me". High to low, and all in between, as it were.)

Eliot’s magnum opus is the dramatic monologue of Europe, in the interregnum between discarding its past (through violence and social/industrial change) and creating its future (also birthed in violence). The ultimate irony is that, in the monologue, Europe can neither speak, nor listen, to itself.

Or it’s just a bunch of rhythmic grumbling in five parts.