143One sign of a great poem is that it continues to grow in meaning. A new
generation of readers can find in the poem their own preoccupations, and
can use those preoccupations to illuminate the poem, to find new meanings
in it. Presumably the poem contains the germ of all these accrued meanings;
that is why it is great and endures. Certainly no poem ever seemed more of
its time than The Waste Land,which expressed, as we used to hear, the despair
and disillusion of the twenties. Yet a survey of Waste Landcriticism illustrates
perfectly the reciprocal relationship between poem and criticism in the
growth, indeed transformation, of a poem’s meaning.
The first stunned, admiring critics—Conrad Aiken in 1923, I.A.
Richards in 1926—saw the poem as completely incoherent and completely
negative in meaning. Richards saw Eliot as “accurately describing the
contemporary state of mind ... by effecting a complete severance between his
poetry and all beliefs,” and remarked “the absence of any coherent
intellectual thread upon which the items of the poem are strung.” F.R. Leavis
(1932) saw in the note on Tiresias a clue to the poem’s unity as the unity of
“an inclusive consciousness,” but saw no progression: “the poem ends where
it began.” Really constructive criticism begins with F.O. Matthiessen (1935)
and continues with such critics as Cleanth Brooks (1939) and George
Williamson (1953), who, taking Eliot’s notes seriously, find progression,
unity, and positive meaning through the built-in analogy with the Grail and
ROBERT LANGBAUMNew Modes of Characterization in
The Waste Land
From Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land. © 1973
by Princeton University Press.