Beyond the Verse - A Modernist Manifesto: Exploring T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, Joe and Maya delve into T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking 1922 poem, 'The Waste Land.' Widely hailed as one of the most significant works of modernist poetry, 'The Waste Land' reshaped literary history with its fragmented structure, interwoven voices, and provocative allusions to mythology, religion, and everyday life.Joe and Maiya unpack Eliot’s kaleidoscopic use of symbols—from the Arthurian Fisher King to Eastern scriptures—discussing how the trauma of the First World War and the fast-changing early 20th century shaped the poem’s tone of disillusionment. They highlight Ezra Pound’s crucial role as “editor extraordinaire” and explore Eliot’s complex interplay of past and present, culminating in the final mantra-like call for peace in Sanskrit. Together, they illuminate how Eliot’s “collage” of cultures, languages, and literary references both challenges and rewards readers over a century later.Get exclusive PDFs on 'The Waste Land' available to Poetry+ users:Full PDF GuidePoetry Snapshot PDFT. S. Eliot PDF GuideModernism PDF GuideTune in and discover:The poem’s revolutionary role in the rise of modernismEliot’s use of mythic, religious, and pop-cultural referencesHow WWI’s upheaval shaped the fragmentation and despairWhy 'The Waste Land' continues to influence poets, critics, and readers todaySend us a textSupport the showAs always, for the ultimate poetry experience, join Poetry+ and explore all things poetry at PoemAnalysis.com.

April is the cruelest month breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers. Hello and welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by Poemanalysis.com and Poetry Plus. Thank you so much for your reading at the start there, Joe, of the poem we're going to be talking about today, which is T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Now, I am very excited to talk about this. It is one of the 20th century's most famous poems, and not solely for how long it is, but for how it changed the course of modernist poetry. So today we'll be talking about the birth of modernism, fragmentation, disillusionment and the importance of poetic collaboration. But Joe, let's talk about T.S. Eliot. What can you tell us about him?

Thanks, Maya. T.S. Eliot was born in Missouri in the United States in 1888, but spent most of his adult life living and working in the UK. He first moved to the UK when he was 25 years old in 1914, settled there, eventually becoming a British citizen in 1920. Now, T.S. Eliot remains one of the most important literary figures of the entire 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948 before passing away in 1965. Now, if we zoom in on The Wasteland, and this is really important to get a sense of when this was taking place, the wasteland was published in 1920, which is the year that literary modernism really took cold. So this is the same year that James Joyce's incredibly influential novel Ulysses has published, and the two men will talk a little bit more about their relationship,

between Elliot and Joyce a little bit later on, but this year changed the course of literary history. There is a before and there is an after 1922. Now, for any listeners who've been following our mini-series on the poets of the First World War, you will be aware of the fact that the First World War is an important context for the birth of modernism. The kind of public consciousness that came out the other side of the First World War is a big part of what influenced writers like Elliot. But comes to the poem itself, for any listeners out there who perhaps have a preconception about this poem that it might be difficult, I'm going to give you permission. It's okay to find this poem difficult, right? It is a famously complex work. As I mentioned, there's quite a long poem,

comes in at 434 lines in total, split across five sections. I'm going to talk more about those sections later on, but the poem is a kind of condensed mix of different influences. We've got religious texts, we've got nursery rhymes, we've got different languages, many different voices in this kind of kaleidoscopic experience. And that sense of being overwhelmed, that sense of the poem drawing on many different influences is absolutely crucial to understanding what Elliot was trying to do fundamentally. This poem is in many ways manifesto for what modernism is what modernism can be. Now, Maya, I read the opening lines of the first section, the burial of the dead to kick off the episode. Is that where you'd like to begin? I think so. I think it's very

important to look at these opening lines in a manner of kind of setting out what Elliot is trying to achieve with this poem. Because as I mentioned in my opening, it really begins to set out all of these key themes that we see throughout the poem itself. And I want to focus in on that first line. It's incredibly famous for just how well it's written, but April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land. Now I want to touch on the fact that April in literature is often seen as a month of rebirth, it's a spring month, it's usually seen as bright. In the UK, we talk about April showers, the rain that brings the new life. But here, April is manifested as a cruel month.

It's something that reminds people of what has been lost. And here, this is such a stark reversal of the typical things that we expect when we hear the month April, that it already sets the reader up to be disappointed by what's going to come. I think that is key when we talk about the wasteland, because what we consistently see is fragmentation, disillusionment, and imbalance when it comes to addressing the positive things. I love the fact that the burial of the dead is the first section and it opens by reminding you that everything that is positive may not be seen as such. My birthday is in April and frankly, Elliot, I'm not over it. I'm not over it. No, I think you're absolutely right. think that that line stands alone. There are a great many quotable moments in this poem. In fact, this poem, perhaps more than almost any other than the 20th century, has provided the titles,

the novels, poems, TV shows, films in the more than 100 years since its publication in 1920. But those opening lines, I think you're right. They absolutely establish a lot of the key themes here. And I think I just like to look after that line, April is the cruelest month, because then we have breeding lilacs out of the dead land. And that juxtaposition between something dead, something that is perhaps decaying and that sense of breeding, which as Maya mentioned, invokes that sense of new life, new generation, is one of the kind of the many moments of conflict that are going to go on to define this plan, this idea of life being birthed from something that is dead. And that word breeding, it's incredibly impersonal, it's incredibly mechanical. This is about processes. It's not about

affection or feeling. But also that phrase, the dead land is really important here, because one of the many illusions in this poem is of the Fisher King. And for those who aren't to wear, the Fisher King is a kind of figure from Arthurian legend, the legend about the Holy Grail, which is one of the things that Elliot returns to again and again in this poem. And the Fisher King is in these Arthurian stories, one of the last protectors of the Grail. But crucially, the Fisher King is wounded. The Fisher King has some kind of unspecified wound to his leg, or possibly his groin, and he is therefore impotent, infertile, and as is the case with lots of kind of medieval portrayals of kingship, the physical health of the king is reflected in the state of the nation that he is the king of.

So the Fisher King's impotence, his infertility, is reflected in the fact the land is barren. The land is one where things don't grow, where things are dark and obscure. and dusty and dirty. So it's not a massive stretch to see where the kind of inspiration for Elliot's wasteland comes from. It comes from this image of the Fisher King that is evoked by that phrase, the Deadland and other lines within

this poem. Now, one of the really interesting parallels we have between the Fisher King in those Arthurian stories and Elliot's poem is that there is an absence of hope here. The Fisher King's situation in the original Arthurian legend is predicated on the idea that one day

something will change. Somebody will claim the Grail, Christ will return to re-invigorate this land. In Eliot's poem, there is no sense of reinvigoration. There is no sense of progress. This is a poem and a landscape that is devoid of hope, devoid of life, and entirely barren, entirely without vitality and energy. I think it's such a fascinating method, the way that Elliot in this poem can take us from a moment in ancient mythology, all the way forward to a modern. experience, a few lines later, drinking coffee over a summer in a different country, in a modern day. And I think it's such an interesting way of continually dislocating the reader,

because again, even though he's in these later lines introducing summer, you have the memory of this dead land, of this wasteland. You have the memory that you seem to have just left something behind without any resolution. And I think that again feeds into the story of the Fisher King. Because you have no sense of resolution, you almost feel as if the story itself doesn't have a centre. I often feel when I read this poem that all of these fragments are kind of pieces around a wheel and we keep going and going. And finally you get to the end, but you just don't feel complete, you don't feel resolved. And I think that sense of barrenness really contributes to this discomfort that you feel as a reader, to be honest. And I think if

If we could just zoom out here and touch on kind of one of the key themes of modernist literature, because I think it's really relevant to this. Modernism is one of those terms that gets bandied around a lot. And goodness me, we could do many more podcasts, and maybe we will in the future, do a podcast episode about the movement that we now know as modernism, about its origins, about its different components. And again, if any of listeners would like to hear that episode, we want to make episodes that you guys want to listen to. So make sure you email with any suggestions, future episodes, whether that's about modernism, particular movement or anything else. but one of the key things about modernism at entry level is a lot of it is about interiority. It's about taking the experience of literature and trying to reflect an internal

experience rather than replicate external events accurately. And now one of the key things here is that this allows writers to be a lot more fluid in the way that they tell their stories. I'm going to name drop here a important philosopher who's an important presence on the modernist period and that Henri Bergson. Now Bergson was very interested in the concept of time. and he famously described time as having two faces. You have external measurable time, the kind of time that we use clocks and calendars to plot the development of, and we have internal time, that same feeling that can make an exam feel like a lifetime and a wonderful summer's day feel like it flits away in an instant. Our perception of time is filtered by our experience of the world around us. Now, what you have there, as a modernist writer who are very influenced by Bergson's idea of time, is you have the ability, to stretch moments, if you want to, but also condense other moments. So what the Wasteland is doing, and the Wasteland features many different narrators, many different speakers, but their experience of the world around them is filtered

through their interior monologue, their interior perception of the world. So that ability to move freely, as Maya said, between a kind of an internal reflection about April to suddenly be elsewhere having a coffee, to suddenly be elsewhere doing something else is a reflection of this fluid interior nature. I mean, we've all experienced that. We can be in a physical place, but our mind can be taking us elsewhere. And sometimes we are rudely, abruptly dragged back to the present. It's that experience of real life, the way life is experienced by individuals that is at the absolute heart of what modernism is trying to replicate. I think that's a really insightful point, Joe. And I actually think it's worth moving

to the second stanza and the opening lines of that second stanza to really illustrate that and I'll just read them for the benefit of listeners. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you only know a heap of broken images. I really want to zoom in here on that sense of interiority that Joe is talking about because what we have here, if we consider time as having these kind of two things, as the external and the internal, or the self as having the external and the internal. Here, what we see is exactly what Elliot describes to us, broken images.

We have something that is rootless, has no branches, and is considered at its base stony rubbish. There is an absolute and complete sense of fragmentation here, and what Elliot brings in is almost that sense of, you know, this isn't a metaphor. This isn't just a poetic description. This is a true moment at which he feels or the speaker feels that society, selfhood has completely broken down. Let's not forget this comes out of the wake of World War I and the world had immeasurably changed.

People had never experienced the horrors and the trauma that came out of World War I ever before. And this was very much a poem written out of the birth of that. So I think it's really important to note that one of the reasons that Elliot is so successfully able to transfer the speaker's voice between different individuals is because he doesn't root himself in one singular voice. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that it's impossible for us to understand what modernism is and why modernism comes to be. And again, I think when listeners and readers look back a hundred years later, it can sometimes feel kind of abstract. Why did this group of writers, the likes of Joyce and Elliot and Virginia Woolf and others, why did they have this great deviation from literature that had come before them? Well, as my mentioned, the early 20th century was a time of absolute change, fundamental, societal, change. Whether that's due to the First World War, whether that's due to the sort of the fragmentary nature of British Empire and other empires, whether that's to do with technological development, the world was changing at a rate that people couldn't comprehend and people

couldn't deal with. The old paradigms, whether they'd be scientific, political, social, were changing. You think about the First World War and you think about things like the Russian Revolution. The world was in a constant state of flux. And what modernism seeks to do is reflect, but also elevate that flux to be what it is. So what modernism is trying to do is reflect that state of flux, that state of transition. And Maya mentioned the word fragment earlier on. And fragmentation is the absolute beating heart of what literary modernism is. You know, Ezra Pound, who are going to talk about later on,

because he's an hugely influential figure, both in the movement, but also in this term in particular. Ezra Pound once used a phrase that became the maxim for modernism. And that phrase was make it new. And what we have in this poem, but also in modernism more generally, is that desire to make it new. And it's worth unpicking that phrase in a bit more detail because make something new. It's different to the phrase, make it new. Because the it in that phrase already exists. You are taking something it is already in the world and transforming it rather than creating something independent of that which already exists.

So what this poem is a kind of collage of the Western world. I mean, there are other influences that go beyond the Western world as well. You know, there is reference to Sanskrit and there are Hindu elements to this poem, but largely we can view this poem as a collage of influences from Western civilization. And I was making a list in preparation of this episode. And the absolutely overwhelming nature of these influences, I think, is worthy of kind of notice. I think it's worth noting. For example, there's as short list as I made.

You've got Ovid's Metamorphosis, you've got the Fisher King, as I mentioned, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shaucer, the works of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Edmund Spencer, Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Tennyson, more recent writers like Aldolf Huxley. I mean, the list goes on and on. This is such a dense collage of different voices, different influences. And like I said, it also moves through different narrators, different languages. And it is the desire to build something out of that which already exist, to take existing components and make them in. to something that is distinct from what they were originally that underpins this poem and what it's trying to do. So just taking a slightly broader view, we've been looking at a couple of specific sections, but it's worth remembering that obviously like every piece of literature, you can read this in a linear fashion, but Maya and I are taking a relatively loose look at this

poem because it's not a text where linearity is necessarily your friend or your ally. The poem is so difficult to follow, it moves voices so often the different sections don't necessarily relate to one another in a cohesive way that Maya and I are taking a more abstract view of the poem. Of course, if you're reading it, all 434 lines of it and you want to read it start to finish, that's a perfectly good way of looking at it, but don't be afraid if you'd rather look at each section individually, if you'd rather change the orders of the sections. The important thing with a lot of modernist poetry is to try and experience the reading of it rather than necessarily understand everything that you read. This is about experiencing the poem on a slightly more kind of

emotive level, listen to the sounds. It's a really fascinating blend of very formal language, very technical language, different languages, alongside some quite basic, some quite childish moments. I mean, it's not quite Joyce's Ulysses, which relies quite heavily at times on phonetic fart jokes, but there are elements of this poem that are nonetheless feel at odds with this 20th century masterpiece that it's often held up as, because it does delve in the silly and the childish at times. Jumping right to the end of the poem now, this is very Bergsonian of us.

That final stanza, which uses this nursery around London Bridge's falling down, is one of those wonderful moments that modernism throws up whereby you have something it is rooted in the silly, the trivial, the innocent, and yet portrays something larger. It hints at a darker truth behind

a kind of trivial childish exterior. But Maya, what do you think about that? It's great that you mentioned the London line there because it was actually what I wanted to focus on, from the end of that first section. Elliot does an amazing job of really situating the reader in London itself. Setting is incredibly important when it comes to analysing the mood of this piece. Now, London Bridge is falling down, as Joe mentioned, is a well-known nursery rhyme.

And London Bridge is falling down is often almost a playground chant. There are games based around it. It becomes a sort of very silly, quite happy, quite funny way of action. discussing the multiple times that the real true London Bridge has collapsed, been attacked, burnt down, been broken down. It's a really interesting thing to mention when you're talking about the decay of society, because again, we have a very serious situation that is being made light of. And what I think it is really incredible actually about the way that Elliot negotiates the kind of landscape of London is the final stanza of this first section of the poem, where he says,

Unreal city. Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge so many. I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs short and infrequent were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Now, Joe and I have talked in previous podcast episodes about pathetic fallacy. And pathetic fallacy is when the weather of a location or a setting reflects the mood of the people. What I find here is that Elliot almost reverses this. And instead, the mood of the people is what creates the weather.

You have those attracted size, short and infrequent. You can feel, even when I'm saying it now, the kind of heaviness and the thickness of those breaths. And that is what is feeding into the brown fog of winterdoll. That is what is making that line feel heavy. And that repetition of so many, again, adds to this sense of weight. I think it's a really brilliant way of traversing kind of typical expectations of London that we see throughout literature that are mechanical and industrial and the fog seems to just be part of the landscape. But here, by using the attitude and the physical breaths of the people, he is physically pulling out almost that soulless mood that seems to encapsulate the nation. But Joe, what do you think about those last few lines?

Well, I'm so glad you mentioned the description of the unreal city because that's actually another one of these references that we've been talking about because that is taken from a Charles Baudelaire poet, the very famous French symbolist poet of the 19th century. And by taking that description, which in Bordelaire is about Paris and making it about London, on the one hand, again, you're doing that thing that the perm is doing, which is it's blurring temporal and geographical distance. things that are far away, both in terms of having happened a long time ago, but also having happened a long way away in terms of miles, those distances, geographical and temporal, are very easily transcended in this poem. And that's the way that we experience the world. We can remember a far away place and make it feel imminent, make it feel immediate. We can remember something that happened decades ago in some cases, and yet it feels immediately palpable. This is Elliot making light sort of belittling the reality.

of geography and time, because actually he can make these things feel a median. I love what you were saying about the reverse pathetic fallacy there, the idea that rather than the external world kind of foreshadowing something about our internal experience, subverting that by almost having these figures, kind of the world emanates out from them. And I think, A, that's a wonderful way of summarizing modernism, this idea that it's the internal that matters. I'm sure Elliot would be very pleased with that description. The idea that it's kind of emanating from the internal experience of these characters,

and it's a lovely democratisation of that trope that I mentioned from the Fisher King. This idea that important people in society, kings, rulers, have shaped at the fabric of the nations they rule is not new. I mean, this is a very well-established literary trope. We see it in Shakespeare's plays all the time, for example, when Macbeth subverts the normal rule of law by becoming king in Shakespeare's tragedy, the nation of Scotland appears to disintegrate around him because he is not the rule. rightful king. What we have in Eliot's poem, though, is that it's not about a single person that's shaping the world around them. It's more about the fact that society itself, there is an internal decay, there is an internal sense of corruption that is emanating out into the

world. And this decaying barren landscape that the poem evokes is a reflection in many ways of the feeling that society was disintegrating at the beginning of the 20th century, the war, the Spanish influenza, which is really important, we haven't mentioned yet, millions of people dead as a result of the war and the Spanish influenza. Revolution's happening. Old monarchy's being overthrown. This world felt so fragile and that fragility is imbued into the landscape of this poem. Now, Joe, here I'm just going to jump ahead a little bit because as you said, we have so much to talk about in this poem and we're not even past the first section yet. So I do want to jump quickly into this second section, which is called a game of chess.

And there's really only one thing that I want to drill into here, which is the use of voice. So in a game of chess, we have a few alternating voices, but primarily we understand it to be an almost stream of consciousness narrative. And here we have the multiple speakers considering a variety of different things. However, there is one consistent voice here. and that is a totally capitalised interjection, which says, hurry up, please, it's time. Not just once or twice, but five times. Now, I have always considered this voice to almost sit outside of the text, not solely for the fact that when you read it on a page,

the capitalisation really makes it stand out and stand apart from the rest of the text. But also for the fact that when you enter a stream of consciousness narrative, you are consistently at the present moment. So to be told to hurry up and that your time is running out is a really unique position to be in. The stream of consciousness tends to not really have an end. And if it does have an end, it finds a very natural one,

either by someone else starting a conversation or the singular person deciding that they want to stop. Here, hurry up, please, its time increases in its intensity before finally the speaker says, okay, good night, Bill, good night, Lou, wishes their loved ones a final moment. But Joe, I'd love to know, have you considered this to be perhaps a religious voice from outside the text? Is this the writer almost stopping himself? Is this pound potentially

interjecting a little bit? Well, it's a fascinating question, and the kind of central conceit of this section is that this is a last call of the bar, effectively this is a barman saying, right, guys, time to clear out, please go home. And yet, as Meyer has alluded to, there is just so much going on here. So your mention of Pound, I think, is a fascinating one. And this relates to one of the central themes that you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, which is this poem does not come out of a single poet.

Now, Pound is hugely important. Yes, T.S. Eliot is the author of this poem. But as we already mentioned, I mean, the number of co-authors that you could almost give credit to because of all the references within it is incredibly long. But Ezra Pound, who I'm sure will get to an episode in his own right, a troubling but ultimately fascinating figure in 20th century literature. He was instrumental in the crafting of this poem. He edited it and we have many copies of pages with his notes.

And it's worth noting that one of the things he stressed above all else was about condensing the poem. He cut out vast swathes of this poem. And you can almost hear him saying, come on, T.S. Eliot, get to the point. Hurry up. Move on. We need to move past this.

And so I wonder whether the lines are a kind of. of playful nod to the fact that one of pounds kind of most consistent pieces of advice for T.S. Eliot was to get a move on, cut this out, you don't need this section, etc. But I mean, these lines seem quite innocuous. Hurry Up, its time is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the most moving or poetic or stunning line ever. And yet they have their own afterlife. It's a sign of the richness of this poem and Sexton. The confessional poet has a poem called, Hurry Up, Please, It's Time, which is all about mortality and all about the impendent. doom that follows. And I think taking lots of great poems might offer up a line that becomes

the title of another work or the title of a film or the epigraph or a novel. It feels almost like you could pick any line from the wasteland and you can find something in it. It is so dense. It is so multifaceted. And the fact that Anne Sexton chose this line, which is seemingly quite innocuous in the context of this poem, and she felt that was resonant enough to inspire and entire poem, I think is absolutely testament to Elliot's quality as a writer, as well as his kind of broader influence on 20th century literature. I do almost feel as if it's perhaps more directed at the reader sometimes, because as you enter that stream of consciousness, you begin to feel a little comfortable. You begin to feel familiar with the poem. You understand where the

voices are coming from, the fact that it's meant to be fragmented. And I almost want to say that in some ways this is also Elia disrupting the reader on purpose. If we skip ahead to the third section, Elia actually considers himself, or the speaker considers himself, to be a prophetic figure, calling himself Tyresius. Now, Tyresius, for listeners who aren't aware, was a Greek prophetic figure. Tyresius, although he is a physically blind person, has the ability to see into the future, has the ability to predict and cast vision. So I think it's a fascinating choice from Elliot to almost self-describe as this person with the ability to prophesize the future. Because of course this is a turning point, not just in everyday life, but for modernism in poetry.

As Joe mentioned, this is almost a manifesto. I find it almost a little bit self-reverent here that Elliot chooses to almost embody this mythological figure who had power and for sight and use it to cast his own aspersions on the modern day. I think it's just, it's so interesting. And I can't quite pinpoint if it's meant to be self-reverential and a little bit ironic or if it's meant to be purposeful. What do you reckon? I think there's always a playfulness to what Elliot is doing with these references. I think when you read a poem like this, you have to balance the gravity of some of the implications of the references he's making against their sheer ridiculousness at times. I mean, there is a playfulness to what he's doing here. And just to zoom out again

slightly, the section we're talking about here, section three is titled the fire sermon. Right there, you have an allusion to Buddhism, because the Buddha gave a kind of a lesson that is become known as the fire sermon, which effectively boils down to the idea that everything around us is symbolically on fire. And if in order to achieve liberation, we have to disassociate from the world around us, well, by aligning himself with a very serious set of religious teachings, and yet also aligning himself with completely different canon in the ancient Greek mythology and Tyresius and is a figure in the Greek underworld, he's already claying with notions of what do I believe in? Do I believe in either? Do I believe in neither? Do I believe in neither? And I think there is a playfulness there.

But in terms of your broader point around how much we should read into these classical references in particular, I think the influence of Ulysses is hugely strong hit. And Ulysses for any listeners who aren't aware is James Joyce's very famous novel published in the same year as this poem. Ulysses is the Latin name for the Greek hero Odysseus, and that novel is doing many things, but on one level is a retelling of Homer's Odyssey, except it takes a 10-year journey home from Troy that Odysseus undertook, and it transforms it, again, this idea of making it new, it transforms it into a single day and the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the early 20th century. So one of the things that's worth noting is that Joyce and Elliot were confidence. They were friends. They exchanged letters.

Elliot had actually read large sections of Ulysses before he wrote this poem. It wasn't published until 1920, but he had been reading sections of it in 1921. So that ability to go back into the ancient world and take the sections that suit you without feeling beholden to reflect the story accurately, I think is something he's definitely borrowing from Joyce. Just on the subject of Tyresius, I think this is another. a really interesting example of the sheer variety and kind of complexity of what Elliot is doing here. So Tyrese is not only a blind sear from the ancient world like Maya was talking about. He's also famous in those stories for his transformation from man to woman, which is also

mentioned specifically in this poem where he's described as old man with a wrinkled female breast. And again, we have that sense of something. It is one thing while simultaneously being another. And this sense of contrast, but also this sense of merging of two distinct things is absolutely crucial to understanding this poem. And Myers mentioned already, we were talking about this before the episode as well, about how this poem is, on the one hand, really focused on water. The evocation of the Fisher King is very related to running water, to rivers. We get London Bridge, which of course is crossing the Thames. And yet this section is called the fire sermon. And once more, we have doing one thing while doing several other things simultaneously, because by associating these running waters, these rivers with fire, he's evoking not only the Bible in which the book of Daniel talks about, a river of fire, but he's also evoking the Greek underworld, which is where Tyresius features in Homer's Odyssey.

And in the underworld, according to Greek mythology, there are several rivers that run into the underworld, the most famous one being the sticks. But there was another one called the Flegerton or the Fledgerton, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, which again is a river of fire. And it's just, I mean, I'm overawed by the sheer density of this poem. There are countless different voices, countless different poetic styles. We would think of this largely as being a free verse poem. Apparently, Elliot himself hates it that idea that it was a free verse poem, because he was wanting more credit for the fact that in this poem you have blank verse. You have dramatic monologues, you have Petrarchan sonnets, you have blank verse, you have internal rhyme. It is the world and the thousands of years of the Western canon made manifest in feels like a long term.

When you consider all of the things it's paying tribute to and reimagining, it's actually relatively condensed. Every line is paying tribute to or reworking, reconfiguring something. I couldn't agree more. Each mention of water, especially within this third section that we're looking at, stands as almost, I want to say, more of a reflection. as to what is truly on fire here, which is the individual, which is the society, which are these much larger and slightly more self-concerned moments of the poem. I just want to push forward to the end of this third section where we have the mention of multiple locations in London and beyond, and we have this stanza where Elliot is talking about Margate Sands. Margate is a beach

in the UK, and of course, as we were saying, Elliot was living in the UK, has probably travelled to this beach and seen it. However, what he does here is mythologise it. And it seems odd to us, you know, Joe and I are both from the UK, it seems like a holiday destination or somewhere that you go on a day trip. But here, he says, on Margate's Sands, I can connect nothing with nothing, the broken fingernails of dirty hands, my people humble people who expect nothing. La La to Carthage, then I came. Burning, burning, burning, burning. Here, the fire sermon is not being preached from these peaceful, calming waters. It is being preached from the individual. It is the individual who is arriving at these places on fire. And here we don't understand fire to be something

more akin to a phoenix rising from the ashes, a symbol of rebirth or renewal. Here it is a symbol of destruction. I'm so glad that you wanted to zoom in on these lines because they are a bit of a modernist nerd like me, especially somebody who is very interested in Joyce's Ulysses. These lines jump out to me straight away for reasons that I'll come to in a moment. But just on the biography, in 1921, Elliot was diagnosed with a nerve of disorder and he was prescribed three months off work and he went to Margate. There's a blue plaque to him, I believe, there, and he spent some time writing what would go on to become this poem while in Margate recuperating.

I don't know if writing a poem not this would necessarily be good for somebody if they were having time off work prescribed, but to each their own. But those lines on Margate's Sands, I can connect nothing with nothing. To me, this is a really clear kind of evocation of one of the pivotal early descriptions in Joyce's Ulysses in which the character Stephen Dedalus, who in many ways, as Joyce's kind of alter ego is in the city of Dublin and he's walking along the beach and he asks himself, am I walking into eternity along Sandy Mount Strand? And I think there is something in both of these modernist masterpieces about the seaside, about the kind of liminal space between land and sea that speaks to this experience of creation because every wave that goes out and comes in is somehow similar to the last one and yet unique and distinct. There is something

about the churn, something primordial about the coastline, which I think is really linked to this idea of creation. But crucially, whereas Joyce's evocation of the seaside in Ulysses is about eternity, it's about vast expanses, it's about expansion without limits. Eliot is about contraction, it's about absence, I can connect nothing with nothing. And despite situating moments of their modernist masterpieces in very similar locations, these beachside scenes, they draw completely opposite conclusions. And I just, I find that so fascinating. I'm really glad you brought up that kind of division between the land and the sea.

And it's not something I'd really considered actually walking into this poem. But as you were talking then, it made me think that as the tides come in and out, as you have this sense of repetition, it really stands to reason that within this poem, it really represents the ambiguity of time. I'm looking at the fourth section of this poem, which is by far the shortest section, In the whole poem, it's only 10 lines. And there is a discussion based around the title, Death by Water, in which the current reflects the person.

A current undersea picked his bones and whispers. As he rose and fell, he passed the stages of his age and youth entering the whirlpool. And it really reminds me of something we talked about episodes and episodes ago now. I believe it was our Maya Angelou episode. I did some incredible reading when I was studying for my master. and one of the authors I wrote on quite extensively was Christina Sharp, who wrote a critical text called In the Wake. And in that, she reasons that bodies that are lost in the sea are constantly recycled. They are both present and past and future as well, because their chemicals are constantly

being reused. And stanzas like this, mentions of water like this, especially when we're talking about modernist poets who consider time in such a non-linear way, it really makes me think that in this poem, each moment at which the ocean breaches the land becomes a representation of time, either past or present, encroaching on the individual. And Elliot does a fantastic job of making, you know, the past moment very immediate or the future prediction very unsettling. So although it doesn't seem that in this poem there is a running thread, I think that movement of water, that constant return to ocean or river or lake or underworld or whatever it is, becomes the kind of central point of this poet, becomes the crux, because you are constantly

being pushed out by the tide and then pulled back in and then pushed out again. You are constantly unsettled, but by being unsettled, you are also held. I think there's no better way to back up your point there than by giving a small reading from Elliot himself, because one thing up we haven't mentioned yet, but is nonetheless crucial to understand this poem is that Elliot was, in addition to being a poet, was also a critical voice. And just three years prior to the publication of this poem, he published, one of the most influential essays ever written on poetry. And it was called Tradition and the Individual Talent. Just something that he wrote that I think is really applicable to what Maya was talking about here, which is that what he's able to do and

what lots of modernists were able to do is reach back into the past and bring it abruptly into the present and sometimes it merges but sometimes it clashes and in both cases there's something to be learned there and he wrote in this essay and I quote the difference between the present and the present is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past awareness of itself cannot show. When you are in a moment in time it is very hard to see it as others will go on to see it in the future. When we look back at the past we have a kind of far broader viewpoint. We have a broader perspective we can view not only the events that happened,

but also their consequences in ways that people couldn't possibly know what the consequences were going to be at the time. So our perception of the past is not simply a retelling of events because it's a retelling of events as mediated by the present. So we are in never to be wiser than those who came before us, just as people after us will be wiser than us. Not on an individual level. It's not to say that people in the past words as cleverest people from the present,

but we all have the benefit of hindsight and we look back, even if we pretend to have it in our contemporary moment, we don't. Only people in the future will know the overall effects and consequences of the actions that we undertake in the present. But it's that relationship between things that have been and things that are happening now, laying them out almost simultaneously. And that extract from the essay, I think illustrates really interestingly the fact that Elliot, like many writers, but particularly modernist writers, are interested in the past. They're interested in not only reflecting and retelling the past, but by reimagining the past and the present, because the context of events, the context of characters shapes those characters and those

events themselves. And when you change the context, you change the outcome and vice versa. But, Maya, when we look back at Elliot and we try to sum this episode up, where would you like to finish off? And is there anything that you'd like to focus on with regard to this relationship between past and present events? To be honest, Joe, I think what I really want to impress on listeners, readers, whoever is kind of exploring Elliot's poem for the first time, is that I think on a first read, because this poem is so lengthy and it has so many voices, for many readers, not only can it feel a little bit daunting and that you're struggling to understand it, but also it can feel a little bit bleep. I think there is a tendency to focus on the fragmentation and

the disorder of the poem and extrapolate that across the lessons you take from the poem. And I find so often, this last section is really ignored. And there's really any three words here that I want to focus on. The three words here that I want to focus on come from the Upanishads, which are written in Sanskrit. And the Sanskrit effectively conveys moral or spiritual concepts in order to lead your life by. And the three words that are mentioned here by Elliot in what the thunder said, this final section, are data, which means to give. It's about gender. generosity and selflessness, whether that comes in the form of kindness or charity. De Yardvam, which effectively translates as sympathy or compassion,

it speaks to the suffering that we've endured through the whole of the rest of Elliot's poem. He takes a moment and a break to offer just a moment of understanding. And the final and most critical one, in my view, is Damayata, which represents control or often self-control. In Elliot's world that he has constructed in the wasteland, the individual is someone that is so fragmented that they become a single voice in a crowd of thousands. We as a reader travel on a journey through the voices of hundreds of people in this poem. And yet here, self-control is one of the final words of the poem, followed by the chant, shanty, shanty, shanty, which translates as peace.

To end a poem of this scale, of this length that talks about ruin and decay and destruction with a moment of solace, and especially one drawn not from a Western religion, I think is such a fascinating choice. But Joe, when it comes to closing a poem like this, one that is so grand in scale, by ending it with the repetition of words that represent peace and solace and control, and all of these moral precepts to live one's life by, how do you think that impacts the reception of this poem as a whole? Do you think it falls flat as compared to everything we've talked about throughout the whole poem? Or do you think it actually stands to reason that this is the strength of the poem?

It's a really good question. I think my answer has probably changed over the years. I first read this poem, I think, earlier in my undergraduate degree, so we're coming up for, I don't want to necessarily reveal how old I am, we were coming out for nearly a decade since then. I think when I first encountered this poem, I was probably unable to look beyond its bleakness, it's barrenness, it's emptiness, it's darkness.

Upon rereading it, I can't help but be moved by these final lines and not just the final kind of declaration you've mentioned, but if I could just throw it back to two or three lines prior to that, these fragments I have shored against my ruins. I think when I first read The Wasteland and Elliot, it's very easy to get caught in kind of the verse. The kind of slightly know-at-allie nature of the poem, it's so eloquent but also so dripping in references and winks at the reader and it's so all-knowing that it's hard to portray the writer as anything other than arrogant voice of mastery in many ways. And yet there's a real humility to these final lines.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins is not a decoration of mastery over the past. It's a really humble declaration of how much the past means to the speaker. What they're saying is, I didn't make this world disintegrate around us, and I'm desperately trying to cling on to everything I can that makes us human. And when I read the last few lines with that kind of frame of reference in mind, I find it uplifting. I find it really quite profoundly moving. This is a poem about how much culture and art and history and storytelling means to us as a human race.

one day it will end. We don't know whether it will end by our own hand or by some other kind of geological power. Of course, like we mentioned, in the wake of the First World War and the Spanish influenza, these questions of absolute death and destruction were not abstract. They were very palpable. Lots of people, it's not a coincidence. This is only three years after the publication of WBEH is the second coming, which we talked about last series, which offers a similarly apocalyptic vision for the world. People and artists were asking themselves, what do we do in the face of our own destruction. And Elliot's answer to that is, I tell myself stories. I go back to the past. I go back to moments from history, moments from literature, nursery rhymes that I can

remember, holidays that I took to the beach, and I desperately cling on to them. And I find something really beautiful about that. And I think if I could just close out the episode by reading, again, a small extract from Elliot's essay, tradition and the individual talent, because I think it underpins this OEM, but also a way that I think a lot of us should think about the past and think about our own place in this story that we're in. The extract is, no poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone. You must see him for contrast and comparison among the dead.

And I guess the biggest compliment that I can pay to Elliot is the one I think that he would want, which is that he has taken his place among those generations of deceased geniuses and that he rightly finds himself alongside the very best of them. Well, thanks, Joe. I think that's a really beautiful way to close out today's episode. I'm sure we could have talked for many, many more hours on this poem and the rest of Elliot's work. And maybe we will in the future. So if anyone's listening and would like to hear more about Elia or about this poem, please do let us know. You can email us directly at Beyond theverse at Poemanalysis.com and you can sign up for a Poetry Plus membership to get all the info about this and more.

Next week we will be talking about Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. But for now, it's goodbye from me. And goodbye from me and the whole team at Poemanalysis.com and Poetry Plus. Thank you.