Modern American Poetry

(^260) Edward Hirsch
that he is expressing only his private experiences ... yet for his readers what
he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret
feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation.”^21 Eliot’s own inner
nightmare correlated to what others perceived as an outer social nightmare,
and thus his spiritual autobiography simultaneously became an account of a
collapsing postwar society.
The Waste Landis an open structure of fragments, a poem without a
fixed center. It has no single interpretation or truth, no one narrator or
narrative thread to hold it together. It disseminates the self. It contains
scenes and vignettes from a wide variety of times and places: agitated scraps
of conversations, parodies, intertextual allusions, unattributed and often
broken quotations, a medley of radically shifting languages, a disturbing
cacophony of voices. The result is a poem with the feeling of a nightmare. As
the facsimile edition of The Waste Landnow makes clear, the manuscript
which Eliot originally brought to Pound was much more sprawling and
chaotic than the final poem. Pound ruthlessly cut the poem from about a
thousand lines to its final four hundred and thirty-three lines, deleted eight
major sections, made dozens of minor changes, recommended against the
title (“He Do the Police in Different Voices”), against using an epigraph
from Conrad (“the horror! the horror!”), and against using “Gerontion” as a
prelude to the poem. The author of “Mauberley” was more comfortable with
the poetics of fragmentation and collage, and his severe cuts foregrounded
the poem’s wrenching dislocations and juxtapositions. The result is a poem
which is rhetorically discontinuous.
Eliot’s method of dislocating language suits the basic despairing tone
and vision of the poem—the theme of a ruined postwar world. The backdrop
of the poem is the “unreal city” of London and, beyond that, the larger
collapse of two thousand years of European history. The people who inhabit
the waste land are the walking dead. The philosophic principle animating the
poem is solipsism, F.H. Bradley’s idea that, as Eliot says in a note to the
poem, “the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.” Thus
there is no genuine sharing of worlds—the experience of each person is “a
circle closed on the outside.” The medley of voices that inhabit The Waste
Landnever connect. The idea of a contemporary world without meaning or
connection is also highlighted in Eliot’s next major poem, a kind of epilogue
to The Waste Land,“The Hollow Men” (1925).
The Waste Landfirst appeared, without notes, in the Criterionin 1922.
(Eliot became the editor of the journal in 1923 and stayed on until the late
thirties.) The title of the poem and what to many critics has seemed to be its
controlling myth (the Grail legend) were late additions and impositions on