Chekhov's Mistress
April is the Cruelest Month?
Right there in the first line I find myself at odds with T.S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land (I found my allergies have made for a pretty cruel May, you see). Ah, but I am a fan of the poem that I love to read but I’ll never understand. Fortunately, there’s someone out there to help.
I have Southams’ annotations, and there are others, but now Lawrence Rainey, the author of Institutions of Modernism, has published Revisiting the Wasteland, and The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose.
I don’t have these yet but they come highly recommend by my brother-in-choice. The Powell’s blurb on Revisiting the Wasteland says that it “alters our understanding” and:
…Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem but also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot’s greatest achievement and on the poem’s place in the modern canon.
Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, The Waste Land turns out to be something quite different: something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet’s intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew.
But if you don’t want to dish out something like 70 bucks, you can always pay a visit to the Hypertext version*, which draws upon the Southam notes and Abrams’ notes in a side-by-side format. Don’t you just love the Web!
*I can’t remember where I saw this link so I can’t give an attribution, but whoever you are, thank you.
Read widely, think well, and write often
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: May 17, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
