Understanding 'The Waste'

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

REVISITING THE WASTE LAND By Lawrence Rainey.

Yale, $35, 205 pages

THE ANNOTATED WASTE LAND WITH ELIOT'S CONTEMPORARY PROSE

Edited with annotations and introduction by Lawrence Rainey Yale,

$35, 208 pages

REVIEWED BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD

What more, at this late date, is there to be said about T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," the mostfamous poem of the last century and only 17 years short of celebrating its 100th birthday? An English scholar of modernism, Lawrence Rainey, has brought out not one, but two books that aim to help us put Eliot's creation more clearly in our sights.

But who are "we" -- how many are there likely to sit down and read once more this monumental example of modernist difficulty and controversy? Mr. Rainey rightly suggests, in his preface to "Revisiting The Waste Land," that most readers will have been first exposed to the poem "in a classroom setting that sometimes encourages a style of reading inimical to [its] grotesque and grim extremism." The name for that style of reading is interpretation, as demonstrated and practiced in the scores of books, essays, and classrooms devoted to explaining what this or that passage or line or word really means. But it is inimical to the poem's ferocity, a word that Eliot used more than once as a term of praise at the time he was composing "The Waste Land."

Interpretation treats the poem as a puzzle to be understood and solved, rather than as a strange performance not to be reduced to orderly codes of meaning. For Mr. Rainey the starting and maybe the ending place for a true experience of "The Waste Land" is to respond to that ferocity; to find, as one of its first readers, John Peale Bishop, found it, in capital letters -- "IMMENSE. MAGNIFICENT. TERRIBLE."