Eliot - The Waste Land

[DirtyMartini]

Listening to this on Radio 4 just now. Enjoying it, sort of, but troubled in ways I can't quite articulate.

I feel a creeping sense of inadequacy in that, despite being quite bright, I just don't understand how to begin understanding something like this.

What I'm hearing intrigues me, moves me, occasionally makes me scoff a bit. But I feel - despite knowing this feeling is probably silly - that I don't have a right to judge it in any way because it's so revered and so widely analysed by people who must know better than me. I think it is packed with classical allusions I don't recognise, which is a bad starting point.

And yet, surely it's fair to say that everyone's reaction to poetry is valid, so ... I dunno. Maybe all that it takes to appreciate it is just to read/listen and react honestly? I truly don't know. I would like to "get" it but I feel so baffled by it.

god, i have this dog-eared, underlined, split-spined copy of eliot's selected poetry somewhere in the house, which i read obsessively in mid-adolescence (slightly chubby, unimpressively tortured spotted teen). now about the general fascistic, misogynist snobbery of the man, but still, the language is undeniably attractive. i comfort myself with the knowledge that he would have been appalled at the co-option of his work by an immature, atheist, irish lesbian for her own inchoate and endlessly aborted romantic ends...

there's no need to worry about understanding poetry, though, i always think. you read it the way you read it, use it for whatever you use it for.

The story of TS Eliot and his troubled marriage has been made into a lovely film about 5 years ago.Yesterday on BBC 7 there was a play based on the same called Tom and Viv.It's still available on I player.

OK, I'm a uni lecturer in Eng Lit. Do you really want to know? (Not that there's one answer to what it means, but I can probably help.)

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust" is that the same poem?

Deaddei - yes.

I love the Waste Land, Prufrock and the Four Quartets, and for Christmas you really can't do better than Journey of the Magi - my English teacher gave me that one to chew on whilst the rest of my class was chewing on Ian McEwan because I'd written him a scathing review of 'The Cement Garden' that he coudln't argue with... Got me into Eliot in a big way, for which I will be forever grateful (and this was in Holland where I was learning English as a foreign language so bless him for making the effort!)