The Waste Land's Pesky Notes
T. S. Eliot's controversial addition to his most famous poem
Aug 7, 2009
Post-World War I Modernism was in full swing, backed by writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats. The Modernist school after 1918 was now presenting life as a fragmented and chaotic experience, without the crystal-clear unities that literature once aimed for.
Complicating the Complicated
The Waste Land, considered the most revolutionary English language poem of the twentieth century, has been a vast puzzle for readers. While addressing social and cultural problems on a basic level, the poem also displays Eliot’s vast knowledge of literature, metaphysics, history, and sociology. The Waste Land’s underlying symbols have meant different things to many different people, a lack of consensus that has been widened by several pages of endnotes.
These notes, which only seem to further distort the poem’s content, were not available in The Waste Land’s original publications. The Waste Land first appeared without notes in the debut issue of Criterion, a London journal founded by Eliot, in October 1922; that November, the poem also appeared in The Dial, a New York journal edited by Scofield Thayer. Notes were not actually seen until The Waste Land enjoyed publication in book form. Boni & Liveright published the first American edition in December 1922, followed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1923.
Rather than elucidate The Waste Land, Eliot’s notes have only increased the confusion. His notes open doors to various sources that have no apparent connection with the poem. An introductory paragraph to the notes claims anthropologists Jessie Weston and James Frazer as influences, a tribute that Eliot later upheld. Notes on specific lines, however, remain as unclear today as nine decades ago.
Eliot’s Reasons
When the notes first appeared in book form, many in the critical world judged them (and, in fact, the entire poem) a hoax. Eliot himself was vague when questioned about these pesky references; years later, the author seemed to downplay their value in understanding the poem’s overall message. In his 1956 lecture ‘The Frontiers of Criticism,’ Eliot called the notes ‘bogus scholarship’ and expressed regret in sending the public on a ‘wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.’
Eliot also gave a partial explanation for the notes in his lecture. He claims an original plan to include notes on all literary borrowings after charges of plagiarism in his earlier work. An opportunity for notes came during The Waste Land’s book publication, when Boni & Liveright said that the volume had several blank pages that needed to be filled in order to justify their expenses for printing. Eliot was against including other poems - he feared The Waste Land’s context would be altered as a result - and decided to expand the notes instead.
No set of notes has generated more controversy than those of The Waste Land. As Eliot humorously noted, they have been nearly more discussed than the poem itself. These fifty references that span from Hinduism to untranslated passages of Dante at first seem incompatible, but have somehow found their way into an organized work of art. And so The Waste Land fulfills one of Modernism’s goals: to establish order amidst prevailing chaos.
Finding a Use
Are the notes of value or were Eliot’s ‘elucidations’ nothing more than satisfying a publisher? In later years, Eliot considered removing this section from reprints of the poem, but judged that it was already ‘stuck’ in readers’ minds; that Eliot considered this move at all suggests how disposable the notes may really be. Yet strangely, this possible horseplay by one of the most gifted poets of our time is a quality that set Modernism apart from earlier periods: artistic creation that adds just as much uncertainty as certainty.
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