The Waste Land at 100

Dear Reader,

This year, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is 100 years old–and we’re still talking about it! As our exhibit Better Craftsmen, Not Gods: An Exhibit on the Editing of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" attempts to show, the poem’s afterlife was a self-fulfilling prophecy strategically crafted by Ezra Pound and Eliot, two writers who sought to meaningfully connect with what they thought of as the “greatest” literature ever created. Here’s a secret from me: I don’t think they’re the greatest.

My coauthor, Tyler Malone, brought it to my attention that some people think of these two poets as gods. This wasn’t an immediate realization I had when starting this exhibit project. Eliot was the first poet I closely read in high school, and that formative experience helped me to start loving poetry, but I didn’t think of him as a god then and I don’t now. What kind of god would write such ridiculous endnotes to his own poem?

Joking aside, Eliot is as important as he is difficult, both in so many complicated ways. Speaking for myself, Eliot’s allure is his humanity and his complications. His poems aren’t perfect, and to some extent he intended “incompleteness” in the poems to show the gaps and shifts in his work as theatrical engagements with sound and energy that maybe make meaning more elusive. These shifts were an element of The Waste Land that Pound tried to weed out in many edits that can be seen in the Faber facsimile edition of Eliot’s 1921 draft of the poem. Eliot was under physical and mental strain and was dissatisfied with his circumstances while writing The Waste Land, and as a high schooler, I saw something like myself as an angsty melancholic theatre kid in this poem and in this sad poet working at a bank. Eliot, like every poet, is human, and so is his poem. Because of their humanity, no poem and no poet are untouchable, and no poem and no poet are beyond questioning and criticizing.

Humans make their own gods, and often make them in their own image. Deification turns poets, including incredibly problematic ones like Pound and Eliot, into canonical figures. Pound did what he could during his lifetime to turn his pupils into gods of the poetry world, declaring their work special, like Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which he told Harriet Monroe is “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American, PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.” If we look to prizes, book contests, and other ways that writers are “discovered” today, we may see similar patterns. Selection, the deus ex machina of the publishing world, is still the way in which most editors and other poets make gods of one another. To some, making poets into gods would be editorship or curation at its most unethical. That’s not how selection, editing, or curation works at its best, and I don’t think prizes are inherently this problematic, but we can see how singling out one author as “the greatest” can cast a shadow on other writers.

When Pound did his best to co-opt little magazines for what he thought of as the future of literature, he propped up his favorites, his greatest gods, as a friend who is an editor might, for better or worse, do. He was proud and jealous–“wracked by the seven jealousies–” in regards to Eliot’s poem, but he also wanted to promote Eliot and his work. People love to make a big deal out of the phrase "il miglior fabbro," Eliot’s dedication to Pound of The Waste Land and a grand gesture of praise and referential deference. As with many of the many allusions and references in the poem, this bow to Dante, who was bowing through Virgil to Arnault Daniel in Purgatorio, canto 26, heaps layer upon layer of tradition on Pound. Before the poem was published, when he had just seen The Waste Land as a messy, shitty first draft, Pound wrote to Eliot, candidly and callously saying, “complimenti, you bitch." Pound meant this to say, this is it, I think this poem is the future of poetry. That’s the highest possible praise, I think, especially in a private letter, before the world could rush up and judge the poem.

Pound showed this praise in his lobbying for Eliot and The Waste Land. Every time he made a deal for Eliot, Pound made enemies of other poets. Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s friend and competitor (as Aiken sometimes saw it), and Pound’s other, more forgotten mentee, wrote back in 1913 to Harriet Monroe decrying her dedication even then to serving Pound’s cause (his ego), going so far as to say it had seriously tainted Poetry magazine’s editorial policies. Nepotism and favoritism, as Aiken saw it, was what Pound saw as defending not only his friends but the best, superlative work of the time.

It seems that, sometimes, the gossip trains of the poetry and publishing worlds try to make gods out of poets—the gossip becomes the stories of how people came to be canonical, their superhero “origins.” One thing to be aware of, if we’re looking for a moral to this blog post, is how we choose what voices we focus on as we read and publish new work. Maybe Eliot's work can be “great,” but not every Eliot poem can or should be. Both Eliot and Pound were biased and promoted harmful perspectives on people and the world. It would be difficult and, perhaps, wrong to ignore the history of the poetry canon, but neither can we let it run the show. If we’re aware of our judgments, we can both criticize and condemn prejudice and bias while also avoiding casting out the canon wholesale; through this work, we may help poets see themselves and help us as readers to see poetry better.

Maybe, too, we can turn gods back into people and avoid canonizing poets in general. As I see it, that’s what this exhibit tries to do; to un-deify two poetry gods, not in order to strip them of their glory and of their work’s importance or its potency, but to show them, flaws and all, as people. Despite any divine aspirations we may have, like Pound and Eliot, we are ultimately human. Our appeal is our temporary nature and all of the trappings that come with that necessary mortality. We turn back into “a handful of dust,” to borrow Eliot’s language, and we rely on others to make our lives meaningful. We are shored against our ruins, as people, by the other people who hold us, show us meaning, and determine what makes life or art “great.”

Power to Poetry,

Robert Eric Shoemaker, PhD

Digital Archive Editor

Works Cited

• Conrad Aiken, “To POETRY: A Protest,” personal letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine, dated January, 1913.
• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Faber Critical Edition.
• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, edited by Valerie Eliot.
• Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot & Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters.
• Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era.
• Ezra Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941, edited by D.D. Paige.