Here is an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's review of James Joyce's novel Ulysses. In it, he identifies Joyce's technique for dealing with art in the modernist period, and names it the "mythical method." It is a technique Eliot uses himself in The Waste Land.
from "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923): T.S. Eliot
The question, then, about Mr. Joyce, is: how much living material does he deal with, and how does he deal with it: deal with, not as a legislator or exhorter, but as an artist? It is here that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a "novel"; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. . . .
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires.
from "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923): T.S. Eliot
The question, then, about Mr. Joyce, is: how much living material does he deal with, and how does he deal with it: deal with, not as a legislator or exhorter, but as an artist? It is here that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a "novel"; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. . . .
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires.
Below you will find a PDF file containing T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. The citation information is as follows: Eliot, T.S. "The Waste Land." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, vol. 1. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, eds, 3rd edition, 474-487.
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Trotter, David. "T.S. Eliot and Cinema. " Modernism/Modernity 13.2 (2006), 237-265.
ts_eliot_and_cinema_essay.pdf | |
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Here is Eliot's own 1921 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
tradition_and_the_individual_talent.pdf | |
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I am providing below a series of interesting critical essays on The Waste Land that might either help you get a better sense of the poem, or help inspire you for your final paper (if you take note of the many different approaches critics have taken to this one poem). The essays are all listed first, and then the essays themselves follow as downloadable PDFs.
"The Second Coming" and "The Waste Land": Capstones of the Western Civilization. Jewel Spears Brooker, College Literature, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Fall, 1986), pp. 240-253.
"Abortion and the Individual Talent." Christina Hauck, ELH, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 223-266.
"T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide." David Chinitz. PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Mar., 1995), pp. 236-247.
"The Tarot Fortune in The Waste Land." Betsey B. Creekmore, ELH, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 908-928.
"Cleopatra and Her Problems: T.S. Eliot and the Fetishization of Shakespeare's Queen of the Nile." John P. McCombe. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter, 2008), pp. 23-38.
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", the Gramophone, and the Modernist Discourse Network. Juan A. Suárez. New Literary History, Vol. 32, No. 3, Voice and Human Experience (Summer, 2001),pp. 747-768.
"The Second Coming" and "The Waste Land": Capstones of the Western Civilization. Jewel Spears Brooker, College Literature, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Fall, 1986), pp. 240-253.
"Abortion and the Individual Talent." Christina Hauck, ELH, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 223-266.
"T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide." David Chinitz. PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Mar., 1995), pp. 236-247.
"The Tarot Fortune in The Waste Land." Betsey B. Creekmore, ELH, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 908-928.
"Cleopatra and Her Problems: T.S. Eliot and the Fetishization of Shakespeare's Queen of the Nile." John P. McCombe. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter, 2008), pp. 23-38.
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", the Gramophone, and the Modernist Discourse Network. Juan A. Suárez. New Literary History, Vol. 32, No. 3, Voice and Human Experience (Summer, 2001),pp. 747-768.
waste_land_as_capstone.pdf | |
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ts_eliot_and_the_cultural_divide.pdf | |
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waste_land_and_gramophone.pdf | |
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abortion_and_the_individual_talent.pdf | |
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cleopatra_and_her_problems.pdf | |
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t.s._eliot_and_the_tarot_deck.pdf | |
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General Notes on The Waste Land class of March 26, 2014.
The main purpose of the class is to approach The Waste Land and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as "paired works" and to try to figure out if we feel comfortable saying that T.S. Eliot's poetic technique in The Waste Land is a form of montage. The stakes of this comparison are laid out both in David Bordwell's article "The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film" and in David Trotter's article "T.S. Eliot and Cinema." Both of these essays are concerned with the question of why exactly it was that modernist artists working in Europe all seemed to develop something that looked like montage or was parallel to montage at the same time in the 1920s. Bordwell encourages us to draw a comparison between film and the other arts for a wider perspective on artistic developments, while Trotter expresses some reservations about jumping to a too-speedy conclusion that montage is a portable technique used in Eliot's poetry as well as films like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.
We noted a few interesting parallels and divergences between The Waste Land and Battleship Potemkin. Both are divided into five parts. Recall that for Eisenstein, he did this because he wanted to borrow the five-act structure of Classical Tragedy. For Eliot, the reasons aren't so clear, but perhaps he too felt that five acts was appropriate for an epic work. We noted that one of Eliot's sections, "Death by Water," is notably shorter than the others, and we wondered why (without necessarily coming up with a definitive answer).
We noted that Eliot wrote a set of his own footnotes for the poem, and that subsequent scholars have added footnotes on top of these. One of the innovative features of The Waste Land was the way that it was footnoted by the author himself, and seemed to break down some of the genre boundaries between poetry and scholarship. Eliot himself had a strong scholarly background (Harvard, Oxford) and was interested in the fields of comparative language, religion, and mythology.
Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," included above, contains his reflections on how an artist should relate to the artists who have come before him. It's a classic of modernist literary criticism, even though it includes many contentious, provocative and counterintuitive statements. The essay is a good "text to think with," and might be a helpful place to start reading if you're interested in writing about Eliot for the final paper.
Much of the poem is organized around the Thames River of London.
The place is clear, but the time is not always clear: we flash around between the present, the age of Elizabeth I,
and other times as well. Greek mythological characters like Tiresias show up to witness some of the scenes. The tarot
deck of the first section turns up again in the Death by Water section with the appearance of Phlebas.
I mentioned that the rat imagery is evocative of First World War poetry and especially Isaac Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches." That's a great poem-- I recommend reading it when you get a chance.
We talked about the way Eliot uses the "mythical method" himself in this poem, in many different places. One example is in these lines of the "Burial of the Dead" section:
"There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!"
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
We noticed that there is a confusion between who is living and who is dead throughout the poem, and an inversion of the natural state of things (ie. April, which should be the happy time of spring is deemed "the cruellest month," etc).
We talked about Eliot's "Eastern turn" at the end of the poem and tried to assess what this meant (particularly in light of the fact that Eliot himself was a conservative Christian).
The main goal of the class was to get a sense of the poem as a modernist work, and also to see if we believed that Eliot's cutting/splicing technique was something we felt right about comparing to Eisenstein's montage. We heard some good points on both sides of that issue. Zac noted that if Eliot is doing something like montage, it doesn't seem to be as propagandistic as what Eisenstein is doing-- it leaves the reader freer to find his or her own meanings. But Mike noted that just because the reader isn't being told exactly what to think doesn't mean that he isn't still suggesting particular meanings by these juxtapositions. To explore that point, we talked about the lines round about the "Shakesperherian Rag" on p. 478 of the Norton edition. We noticed that going from a quote from The Tempest to a popular song based around Shakespeare was a montage-like sort of cut that probably suggests some sort of commentary on Shakespeare-- but the nature of the commentary can be interpreted in several ways (ie. maybe "Shakespeare is still relevant in the present," or "Shakespeare is being cheapened in the present," etc).
I also asked the class how they would film an adaptation of The Waste Land, if they were assigned to that task. We ran out of time before we could discuss that.
The main purpose of the class is to approach The Waste Land and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as "paired works" and to try to figure out if we feel comfortable saying that T.S. Eliot's poetic technique in The Waste Land is a form of montage. The stakes of this comparison are laid out both in David Bordwell's article "The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film" and in David Trotter's article "T.S. Eliot and Cinema." Both of these essays are concerned with the question of why exactly it was that modernist artists working in Europe all seemed to develop something that looked like montage or was parallel to montage at the same time in the 1920s. Bordwell encourages us to draw a comparison between film and the other arts for a wider perspective on artistic developments, while Trotter expresses some reservations about jumping to a too-speedy conclusion that montage is a portable technique used in Eliot's poetry as well as films like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.
We noted a few interesting parallels and divergences between The Waste Land and Battleship Potemkin. Both are divided into five parts. Recall that for Eisenstein, he did this because he wanted to borrow the five-act structure of Classical Tragedy. For Eliot, the reasons aren't so clear, but perhaps he too felt that five acts was appropriate for an epic work. We noted that one of Eliot's sections, "Death by Water," is notably shorter than the others, and we wondered why (without necessarily coming up with a definitive answer).
We noted that Eliot wrote a set of his own footnotes for the poem, and that subsequent scholars have added footnotes on top of these. One of the innovative features of The Waste Land was the way that it was footnoted by the author himself, and seemed to break down some of the genre boundaries between poetry and scholarship. Eliot himself had a strong scholarly background (Harvard, Oxford) and was interested in the fields of comparative language, religion, and mythology.
Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," included above, contains his reflections on how an artist should relate to the artists who have come before him. It's a classic of modernist literary criticism, even though it includes many contentious, provocative and counterintuitive statements. The essay is a good "text to think with," and might be a helpful place to start reading if you're interested in writing about Eliot for the final paper.
Much of the poem is organized around the Thames River of London.
The place is clear, but the time is not always clear: we flash around between the present, the age of Elizabeth I,
and other times as well. Greek mythological characters like Tiresias show up to witness some of the scenes. The tarot
deck of the first section turns up again in the Death by Water section with the appearance of Phlebas.
I mentioned that the rat imagery is evocative of First World War poetry and especially Isaac Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches." That's a great poem-- I recommend reading it when you get a chance.
We talked about the way Eliot uses the "mythical method" himself in this poem, in many different places. One example is in these lines of the "Burial of the Dead" section:
"There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!"
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
We noticed that there is a confusion between who is living and who is dead throughout the poem, and an inversion of the natural state of things (ie. April, which should be the happy time of spring is deemed "the cruellest month," etc).
We talked about Eliot's "Eastern turn" at the end of the poem and tried to assess what this meant (particularly in light of the fact that Eliot himself was a conservative Christian).
The main goal of the class was to get a sense of the poem as a modernist work, and also to see if we believed that Eliot's cutting/splicing technique was something we felt right about comparing to Eisenstein's montage. We heard some good points on both sides of that issue. Zac noted that if Eliot is doing something like montage, it doesn't seem to be as propagandistic as what Eisenstein is doing-- it leaves the reader freer to find his or her own meanings. But Mike noted that just because the reader isn't being told exactly what to think doesn't mean that he isn't still suggesting particular meanings by these juxtapositions. To explore that point, we talked about the lines round about the "Shakesperherian Rag" on p. 478 of the Norton edition. We noticed that going from a quote from The Tempest to a popular song based around Shakespeare was a montage-like sort of cut that probably suggests some sort of commentary on Shakespeare-- but the nature of the commentary can be interpreted in several ways (ie. maybe "Shakespeare is still relevant in the present," or "Shakespeare is being cheapened in the present," etc).
I also asked the class how they would film an adaptation of The Waste Land, if they were assigned to that task. We ran out of time before we could discuss that.