In Our Time - The Waste Land and Modernity

Episode Date: February 26, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests, including Steve Connor and Lawrence Rainey, discuss TS Eliot's seminal poem The Waste Land and its ambivalence to the modern world of technology, democracy and capitalism that was being forged around it.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in October 1922, the latest edition of London's Literary magazine, The Criterion, hit the shelves. In it was a new poem by a little-known American poet.

The poet was Thomas Stearns Elliott, and the poem, The Wasteland. It turned out to be among the most influential poems ever written in English. The wasteland found a new way to express the modern world in all his bruising, gleaming cacophony. Yet Elliot himself has been accused of willful obscurantism, misanthropy and of high-minded despair at the paucity of 20th century living.

But could someone who captured modern life so well really dislike it so much? And when he looked out at a world of radio and cinema, a radical art, Joyce, Stravinsky, and universal suffrage, did T.S. Eliot see only her barren featureless plane. With me to discuss the wasteland and modernity, Lawrence Rainey, Professor of English and American Literature at the University of York, Fran Brierton, reader in English at Queen's University of Belfast,

and Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College London. Steve Connor, the Wasteland was published, as I said, in 1922, just after the First World War, could you give us the context, the cultural, the social context in which it was conceived and published? I think we can see this as the kind of confluence of history that was, a history that wasn't quite over and a new world that in Matthew Arnold's words was powerless to be born. There's a kind of curious, you know, logjam there. We've got the political map of Europe being radically redrawn in the, you know, abiding chaos of the aftermath of the

First World War. Rampant inflation in Germany in 1921. Closer to home, the Irish free state is declared in 1921, there'll be civil war in Ireland for three years. The aftermath of the Russian revolution is causing revolutionary upheavals right across Eastern Europe. It's a time also of social upheaval, particularly focused upon women, the suffrage that you've spoken about. Women's rights and votes for women was put on hold during the war, but in 1918, indeed women, over the of 30 were given the vote in Britain, closely followed by an extension of the vote to women in America, Germany, Russia and elsewhere. A lot of sense has after the Second World War that social changes that have been enforced by the war meant that somehow the world could not simply be resumed in the way that it had been before. and yet at the same time

the sense that everything had been blown apart there was also I think a sense that somehow it was all oddly in an unreal kind of way still holding together like some bomb had gone off but left everything standing but you suspected that behind the facades you know there would be nothing so that strange sense of unreality

as in a way the world just carries on especially in the UK and we told that earlier started to wrote the poem about 1919, it came out in 22. Do you think he was peculiarly sensitive to the aftermath of the First World War, the suffragettes, the other things you've talked about? Well, I think he felt...

You've implied that the social conditions meant that he would take these into consideration when he was writing the poem. Do you think that's correct? Yes, and he read a book by Herman Hess, Blikin's chaos, a glimpse into chaos, which he refers to in the notes to this poem, which suggested that this perspective was one that was at least bearing upon him.

On the other hand, you know, Elliot did not live a life that was in the thick of such things. He was a poet, but he was also a banker. He worked for Lloyd's Bank. This poem was written or was completed in Margate, Switzerland. He took extended leave during a period of illness and depression. So in a certain sense, Elliot was really quite a withdrawn, or marginal figure. So I think there's a curious kind of communication of the personal and the political.

He'd been to see Stravinsky, he'd been to listen to Stravinsky and been very impressed by that in 1913. He had connection with Joyce's Ulysses. He was very aware of two, at least, of the great peaks of modernism. How did that, and something else that you threw in, you're quite interested in this, might I think amuse our viewers, oh, God, there we are, listeners,

is that the British Broadcasting Company was founded in 1920, which you think is significant as well. So can you bring those cultural phenomena together? Yes, yes. Well, I think in a way what we have is a series of radically experimental works across different media that we will later come to call modernism.

Modernism sounds like it's got a lot to do with being modern and of course it does these were artists who felt that the conditions of modern life needed you know needed meant that you had to kind of start again and give up traditional forms traditional forms of structure and

orderliness and expectation and so forth and yet modern writers were also often quite uneasy about the modern world the modern world increasingly democratic increasingly a mass world a world of mass communications modernist

works like T.S. Eliot's the Wasteland. I mean, I don't think the term was used in this sense in 1920, but it begins to be formed at this moment. These works simultaneously seem to belong to that world and yet also to shy away from it. Can you just pick up the stitch about the connection you make between the BBC British Broaddising Company, it was then called a foundation? Took me a bit by surprise, but there we go. There's been a lot of radio for a long time. But curiously enough, nothing to listen to. You know, when people turn their houses into radio stations as what you had to do to listen to radio,

you listen to ship radios. But when there was something to listen to, there was a new medium and a new form. And the wasteland reads pretty much like a radio play before there was such a thing. Yes, the voices. Fran Bredden, can we develop the idea of modernism in this context? I think we can.

I think part of what Steve is. even as saying is that what's happening in this period rests on a kind of contradiction. So there's a huge excitement about progress, about technological development. This is a period of history where change is happening more rapidly, probably, than at any other. And so there's a great enthusiasm and excitement for that, and I think new media are part of what's happening in literary experimentation. The downside to that, of course, is that the consummation of modernity, if you like, is something like the First World War is the extreme scale of suffering that comes out of the capacity of human beings to mass produce and to mass

produce weaponry. So modernity has a dark side as well as a positive side. If you then come to literary modernism, what it's doing and what these writers are responding to that idea of modernity. But they're responding in very contradictory ways. I would agree with that. They're both looking with great excitement themselves and they're finding new forms of experimentation in technique that replicate in some ways that mimic things they're seeing happening in a technological world. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of fear and uncertainty about fragmentation, about a loss of a sense of self, about the lack of any kind of stability in society. And a lot of the features we see in modernist writing the way it would tend to fracture

unities, as in the wasteland's different voices, we'd maybe say a little bit more about that. some of the ways in which it acknowledges that you can't see and understand everything that the world has become a much more bewildering place. What it's doing is trying to find new ways of articulating that in literary form. So you see this almost as a project.

This fact of post-First World War existence meets these artists. Let's stick with Elliot. Meet Elliot. And Elliot says to himself, I am being simplistic, but just for the sake of it, says to himself, things have changed so much that I, too,

as a poet must change. I can no longer be the poet of my earlier poems. I can be a poet like many of those I admire. I have to be a completely different sort of poet. Is that how you're suggesting it works? Because the sense of the present is bearing in on him so strongly, even as mentioned depression and illness, that does make you massively more vulnerable to what's going on around you. Is that what's going on in his mind? I think it is whether one would ever say, in Elliot, this is a conscious agenda. I am saying, setting out to do X, Y and Z, I think it's very difficult. Elliot at certain times said that he was

and at certain times implied that he wasn't. But I do think the decisive shift is in that period. Many people said that change began earlier. So Virginia Woolf said, of course, famously that 1910 was the point where everything altered. But when you actually look at where the modernist works begin to appear, the very experimental modernist works, 1922 is the year of the wasteland.

It's also the year of Ulysses. It's the year of Wolfe's first modernist. modernist novel Jacob's dream. So there is a convergence of particular kind of writing. There is a sense of things coming to fruition in the immediate post-war years. How would you characterize Elliot's

poem's use of language and its structure? How would you say that that in itself captured was an attempt to capture the modern world, the post-First World War, modern world? I think it's easy now at a kind of 90-year distance to forget how shocking it might be and I think the reaction

to it was something like the reaction, say, to Zavinsky's right of spring. People did not know how to read it. It's an epic poem, if you like, but it's a fractured epic. We can't make coherent sense of it as a narrative in the way that we can of earlier narratives. It's experimenting with voice and language, and I think the most destabilizing fact about it is we have no sense of a single coherent voice that's controlling the narrative. Even in its opening few lines, we can hear tonal shifts. We can't identify quite who is speaking at any one point. So it's fractured into multiple voices. And as Stephen was saying, almost as if it's a play, but not actually identifying who the characters are. So it's very destabilising.

It's also, I think, in its use of language, doing two quite extraordinary things, it takes a very traditional language. There are moments in this poem, which could almost be lifted from Shakespeare, the very famous opening of Section 2, which draws on Anthony and Cleopatra. And then he will completely disrupt that with a little bit of popular song, with a bit of a bit of, of nursery rhyme with some kind of demotic speech. He'll throw in other languages without providing a translation for you. There's an obvious surface difficulty to it in that sense that some of it is not comprehensible to the reader. Lawrence Rainey, should we be looking for coherence in this poem?

I think that's a good question. And partly it's a larger question. Do human beings need a certain kind of, let's say, narratiable coherence? Do they want endings and conclusions? or have they learned to live with a certain amount of mess? And I think France's point needs to be picked up. The wasteland is, at least in first reading, an extremely messy poem. It's very difficult to say who exactly is speaking at any point, whom are they speaking to. Is there even a protagonist?

Does he go through changes in developments? Is there a storyline at all? So the answer is it may also depend on us culturally. Let us say what kind of coherence do we want to have or do we need? Or have we become accustomed to modernist forms, which don't have those kinds of coherence that we associate with, either the Victorian novel, let us say, or more generally with realism in the Western tradition?

It's been mentioned once or twice the various voices, and the tightly almost used sloppy, he do the police in different voices and so on. Can you give the listeners some idea of the range of voices employed? I've sometimes thought it if you went through the poem and called them by different little names, each of those sections, you might have a better chance of reading it earlier clearer. Well, it would be difficult, and it would be, it's an interesting challenge, actually, to do what you just said, and namely to go through it line by line and say, who is speaking here, how many voices are there?

How do we mark off a voice? Even something quite simple at the very beginning of the poem, for example, about line five or so, you get, winter kept us warm, covering earth and forgetful snow. Fine, there isn't us, but then you get the next line. summer surprised us coming over to Steinbergersing with a shower of rain. It's a perfectly legitimate question for a reader to say, wait a minute, is that first us, which seems to be everyone who's ever been alive or dead on the planet,

quite the same as the second us, which seems to refer to two people in a specific time and a specific place. So that kind of confusion goes all through the poem. In theory, in most works, us is always us. But here, something as simple as us turns out to refer to two quite different entities. So we could go through it quite literally line by line like that, whole way through and ask just these kinds of questions again and again and again.

People, there are the quotations from Dante and Wagner and Shakespeare and Bodler and on and on it goes, but also from Music Hall, can you just give us some idea of the range of voices, Lawrence? Well, Music Hall was, of course, one of the great forms of modern mass culture, arising somewhere in the late 1860s and vanishing largely in the people, period between World War I and World War II. It became a dying form that was killed more or less by Hollywood cinema. Many of the great musicals became cinema halls. But it entailed a most capacious kind of form. And so people would come out and do a turn or a routine, as it was called. But people wouldn't just sing a song. They would also do a whole routine and act. With the song was also a

performance, a kind of little mini acting session. So you would have these one after another. Point is Elliot was a great aficionado of Music Hall and thought it was one of the most marvelous of contemporary forms and indeed even though he was ill in the whole course of 1921 when he was writing the poem he took time out to write one essay and that was an essay lamenting the death of Marie Lloyd perhaps the greatest of all musical hall stars so one way we could look at the poem would be as a series of music hall turns

which don't have to have any kind of connection to one another at all as narrative works No, they didn't. When Nijinsky brought his own company over before the First World War to this country, he performed a musical. He was one of the acts. His outfit was one of the acts. Anyway, that's as may be. Briefly, Lawrence, Elliot, as we've been told by Steve was a banker, was working in Lloyd's. He was ill and depressed some of this time. But he nevertheless had a full-time job, and he had a full-time job for most of his life. And then, at favour-in-favour and favour, was a proper publisher. Very proper publisher. How did this being a banker at a time of extraordinary economic instability, massive inflation. Is this a crude question to ask? No, it's not a crude question at all, because Elliot's job was a very odd job, but it's a job that someone might well have here at the BBC. His job was to read

foreign newspapers every morning and prepare a report on the latest banking developments for the Board of Directors. In other words, he would have announcing something like RBS's results for this morning and how dire they were, and what were the implications for Lloyd's Bank. So he was in fact a keen

follower of contemporary economics. He was was a full supporter of Maynard Keynes' theory that the Treaty of Versailles, which had been signed in 1921, was an absolute financial catastrophe. So, in fact, the poem has all sorts of wonderful laments beginning at the part three. You have all these sentences about the nymphs are departed and the heirs of city directors, their friends, are departed. The city is a kind of vast, desolate, empty wasteland, written, emptied out by shoddy finances. And somehow that seems to be connected with a strange form of sexuality. So different kinds of economy flow all through the poem,

linguistic, sexual, and financial. We try to be never knowingly relevant, but you've gone very close to it there. Steve Conn't, can we look at the poem more closely now? One of the famous lies, and it's full of quotations like Hamlet's, isn't it, is

describing a heap of broken images. It's not a bad one way into the poem itself. Can you go into that idea, more into that idea of the fragmentariness of the poem. Yes. Well, one of the things that's suggested by that, I mean, I always see, you know, something like the scenes in Eastern European capitals

after the fall of communism, that these broken images, you know, are images once venerated that have now been... What images do you think you're talking about? Well, I mean, I think he's actually talking about, in very general terms, about what we now call icons. Would we be curious kind of way.

So these are touchstones of value. These are things that once compelled assent that survive in some kind of way, but not whole. Can you be more particular? Well, I think it would be something like, well, actually, I'm somewhat stumped there because everything in the poem is groped at and grasped at rather than coming clearly into focus. But certainly it will be something like... Is he talking about values?

Is he talking about physical objects? What's he talking about? I think he's talking about literary works, for one thing. And as it were, you know, the points of literary history where value might seem to be concentrated. So, as it were, Shakespeare or Ovid, the very material of his poem, which are broken, which are available to him seemingly only in these half-remembered, half-overheard scraps that he can't keep out of his mind but can't quite summon into it either. Lawrence Rainey, this idea of the breaking up of established forms, let's keep taking news 1922,

because it's useful, it's useful. Was that around? Was it bearing on people who were... Certainly, Alley, was extremely aware of contemporary developments and, above all, aware of James Joyce and aware of Ulysses. In particular, he was aware of reading the so-called Circe episode or episode 15 of Ulysses. Whether that helped him out. Why is that significant? Well, for one thing, it led him to write a passage of about 50 lines, which we no longer have, which were the original beginning to part one.

And those 50 lines described a group of young men who were having a rowdy night in Boston and had been out drinking too much. So, originally the poem might have begun in such a way is to suggest that all the many voices that came subsequently were overheard in the course of a rowdy night on the town. Those first 50 lines were taken out by

Ezra Pound when Elliot brought the poem to him in January of 1922. So, again, what Pound did was strip out the kinds of narrative beginnings that would give you handles to reading the poem as a whole. So that's why, partly it is the way it isn't partly, you know, Joyce was a kind of big influence on Elliot at the time.

It gave Elliot a sense of freedom that you could do almost anything now. Can I develop that with you, Fran Brinette, for a moment? The pound, he dedicates the poem to pound, the greater craftsman. He called the better craftsman he calls him. And pound did a very substantial job on this poem. So can you just give some idea of the amount he took out and amended, the change he made? It's an extraordinary quantity of material. This is another American, another.

the poet. Of course, yes. And since the early 70s when the manuscripts were made available and that we can see how much we've actually lost, much of it, I would say, I would say we are happy to lose as well. There are some very interesting moments in there, very problematic ideas about women, for example,

that are editor out of the final version, that I think some slightly derogatory comments about intellectual women being rather dull, which perhaps we wouldn't want to see in there now. And the changes at the beginning, I think, are hugely significant. And it goes back to Stephen's point as well about breaking and disrupting in this

broken image and the literary tradition. We begin with April is the cruelest month. A very, very famous line. Where is it taking us back to Chaucer? And Chaucer is saying the opposite. April with its shower suite is actually kind of healing and regenerating the landscape. So in that opening line now, which Pound put there really is the first line of the poem, we've got that entire sense of a tradition destabilized of Elliot doing something to shock. Why is he stabilising it? Because he's turning around and saying that what we traditionally think of as

spring and healing and regeneration is no longer working. The wasteland, if you like, is there in that first line. Partly he's picking up on spring-like events which have become moments of atrocity through the First World War where spring is the spring offensive, is the time of destruction

rather than renewal. The other two want to get in, but I just want to ask one more question. How many lines did Pound take out of the poem? so that we just know. And what did he... And why did he listen to him? I mean, you're a poet,

you've published a lot of poems, and you send it to him, and he takes... Tell us how many lines are dark. It's better you say, and how much, and how... I know, Lawrencewood. It's hundreds, I think,

but Lawrence... It's 100. 120 lines out of a not very long poem, really. You could have lost a bit more, potentially, but I mean, that's perhaps a controversial point. It's funny you say that, because, of course,

he did want to lose more. At one point, he suggested getting rid of the entirety, it's very small, about 12 lines of part 4. And Ezra Pound said, no, you cannot take that out. So that's another question. Does it have to go the way it does now?

Or could we move, let's say, the ending from part 3 to be the ending of part 1, or the ending of part 1 to be the ending of part 4? In other words, is it really a sort of modular construction rather than an unfolding argument or an unfolding narrative? That's really the thing I'm sure that Ezra Pound did, that if you read the early drafts, which are available, I have been since 1971 in fact, Simile Edition,

then you'll see that actually you have a series of steadily unfolding, unfolding in quite a leisurely way, little stories. And what Pound did was speed that whole thing up so that you lose any sense of kind of unfolding or duration. And it's a kind of channel hopping experience. You know, it's as though you're just getting interested in something. Why did Pound think that was better than Elliot? Did he ever give any reasons?

I've got it written down anyway. I think it's a... a way, I think Pound had begun to discover the possibilities of this in some of the ways in which he was writing in the early sections of his very long, lifelong, never completed poem, The Cantos. But I think he also saw,

as poets often do when they see, look at each other's work and novelists too, I'll be bound, he saw things that Elliot's poem, if he changed it, could teach him. You know, so I think, I think it is a kind of, a kind of odd collaboration because there were things that perhaps Elliot didn't realize, that he could show is repound, about, you know, radically chopping things up.

Can we talk a bit about the wasteland, the wasteland, but it's also very much London at the time, unreal city, under the brown fog over winter noon, I think one of the many references to Dickens that he doesn't acknowledge. He acknowledges just posh people, but not my dog, but anyway, he doesn't acknowledge it. There's quite a bit of Dickens there, he doesn't acknowledge. Can we talk about London in the poem? First of all, you, Lawrence?

We certainly can. It's very much, I think it's fair to say, a city poem, all of the locations that it mentions are distinctly within the city. At most, you get Queen Victoria Street, just slightly to the west of the city, but otherwise it's restricted to the financial district of London. So... A poem about the financial district. It is very much a poem about how the financial district has become a wasteland.

And it does have a peculiar urgency for our time. It does. The very famous line, the crowd flowed over London Bridge. So many, I had not thought death had undone so many. How we read that, it's been interpretive. as being the commuters in their kind of dead existence going to and from work undone by urban life as much as it's been read in other and more metaphorical ways. But it is lesser poems specifically about London than it was in the early versions

in which there's a couplet that goes, I think, Oh, London, your people abound upon the wheel, phantom gnomes burrowing in brick and stone and steel. And that was lost because I think it just seemed too direct. This is a London populated by ghosts, populated by other cities, sort of superimposed on other cities. He does mention other cities, doesn't it, Athens, the Jerusalem. Well,

that point is well taken. Stephen's point is well taken because, although it's concentrated in London and in the financial district, in revising the poem, even in something as small as revising the epigraph, the original epigraph was Joseph Conrad, the horror, the horror. But instead, of course, you get

Petronius. In other words, the revisions tend to work outward in time to ripple backwards and forwards. So that there's a kind of peculiar discrepancies, as it were, between the extreme concentration on city locations and locales and this huge rippling effect that ripples out back into the past and around geographically. We could also say, I think, on that point that when he's naming other cities, he's playing with time as well as with place, so that he's going back to Rome, Athens, and then through to London,

he's encapsulating a decline in human history over thousands of years. That simple phrase, I did not know, Death had undone so many. It's one of the examples where you can play an enormous number of interpretations and all games with it, can't you? You think had undone them, they're dead commuters, because there is a sense of de au en bas about it all the time these persons down there, the lovely typists and so

and so that's one way and it could refer back to the first one. I've often thought it just means that people had been born, they'd been dead before they'd been born. It may simply be that. There are literal images that matter to people at the time, so the crowd marching past the cenotaph, say,

the ones who survive are also representing in some ways the dead. So that was very strong visual image for people, particularly from 1919 through to the early 20s. But again, the idea of the automaton, I think in the typist, is very interesting too, that people are becoming machines, they're becoming themselves a mass production. One passage that both of you have alluded to, it's worth recalling because it's a passage about Athens and Jerusalem and London. It comes at the end in Part 5, but one should remember that it's preceded by two other passages, one in part 1 and one in part 3.

So here we have a poem in five parts. In part one, we have the lines, Unreal City, Under the Brown Fog of a Winter Dawn. Part three, in the middle of the poem, Unreal City, Under the Brown Fog of a Winter Afternoon. Any competent reader will know what you could come next. Unreal City, under the brown fog of a winter evening, twilight. But instead, what you get is,

Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London. unreal. So Elliot sets up these kinds of expectations of a certain kind of coherence, but also just rips them apart, blast them to pieces. There are two, three bleak sexual encounters. The best you could say about them. Anyway, they're bleak. Leave it at bleak. Do you think that is anything to do with Elliot's? Are we being, is it probing to, is it being too simplistic to say it's to do with his own life at the time?

Was it a bleak, depressed life? Or is it part of his schema of what this wasteland is? Well, he'd certainly entered into a difficult marriage, an intensely taxing marriage with a wife who was very disturbed, made life very difficult for Elliot, had huge demands on him, and eventually he would negotiate a separation from her. So I think that's very much part of it. But I have to say that for me, this is one of the mystifying things about the poem. have had it explained to me. I've explained it to students how important it is that the theme of sexuality and of sexuality that is not related to patterns of human value, fertility, redemption and so forth is an important theme in the poem. I don't get it. I don't see why Elliot should focus

on this aspect of modern life. Mary Stopes opened her first clinic in 1921. So I think there is a kind of background of, well perhaps sexuality has been. become, you know, with contraception, perhaps we're now out of nature entirely. But I just don't see any connect. That seems to me to have something of the oddity of an obsession rather than something that really relates to anything else that's going on. There are so many other difficult things about modern life. Why does he go on about people having unsatisfactory?

Yes. Loving counties, you wouldn't call them the first. Lawrence, have you got an explanation of them? that the central episode that you're referring to has been referred to variously as the seduction or the rape or the mechanical encounter of a person whose name we don't know again so these mysterious identities are sort of young man carbuncular and an equally nameless typist.

One thing that is important to remember and I think there is one thing one should consider is that it ends of course with the lovely quotation after the young man carbuncular has left she smooths her hair with automatic hand and puts her record on the ground. gramophone. Well, one may wonder, is she actually a figure for the poem's own activity, which is to say, here's a poem that's filled with hundreds and hundreds of quotations,

is putting a record on the gramophone and spinning it a figure for or a metaphor for what the poem itself is doing? Is she a figure for the way in which perhaps an art founded on repetition and quotation and citation, such as that of Elliot, is perhaps in crisis? You certainly gave your ergonomics a terrific time, didn't he Elliot? I mean, it's wonderful. There are things you can spin around. I just asked about sex, and away you go. Can we talk about then the mythic

power of it? The relation in his introduction to his notes, which are almost as nomic as the poem itself on first reading, he refers to Jesse Weston's book, from ritual to romance and Frazier's book, a Golden Bar.

In fact, he gives Jesse Weston enormous. This was this title, this was the plan, read it for itself. So Steve Connor, can you tell us what he, frankly, took from that? Well, I think we have to remember, first of all,

became obsessed with myth. It was an obsession they inherited from the Victorians. I think what they were obsessed by fundamentally, it's not so much the content of myths, but that myths were translations without originals. If you think of any myth, there are lots of different versions of it. You never know which

the version is. So, So Elliot, in a kind of way, is interested in that sheer fact of myths. But he was interested in particular myths, the myths that were written about at enormous length in J.G. Fraser's The Golden Bough, the first version of which appeared in 1890, but was still being produced in every large... So which myths did he pick on? So these are myths of what he calls rather primly in his note vegetation ceremonies, but he means fertility myths. Fraser's theory was that fundamentally most of our myths, Greek myths and myths from all around the world, actually rest upon rituals that were rituals of fertility, renewal, trying to get the crops to go and everything.

How do these come into the poem, Lawrence? Well, that's a very important point. When Elliot in January of 1922 brought the as yet incomplete poem to Ezra Pound in Paris, he happened to come at a very special moment because by sheer chance Horace Liverwright, head of the American publishing firm Bonnie and Liverwright, was also in Paris and was looking

to buy new works by exciting writers. Pound told him that he had an incredible poem that was going to be the major work at the time. Liverwright was extremely interested, but when he got the manuscript, he was very disappointed that it was as short as it was and asked could Elliot please

add anything. The notes are what Elliot added to pad out the poem. So that one way we could talk about myth in the poem is to say that there is a myth of the myth, which is to say the notes are very unimportant. They were simply added on to add up some pages. So are you saying... To give it a kind of bogus scholarship.

And I'll even help later dismiss them. To translate it into the broadcasting vernacular, are you saying that he didn't take as much as he said he took from Jesse Weston's book and from... That's right. In fact, he did with the same thing that Joyce did. As publication of Ulysses neared,

I mean they sooped it up They souped it up It's fine It's interesting the way he soaps it up The way he soups it up It says there is this unconscious structure That is kind of threaded through the poem

You know why does that now suddenly compel a cent That there is something there You'll just have to kind of pick up By hints and whispers I'll give you these hints in the notes But somehow it rests upon As perhaps human culture rests upon

some religious secret I think this is this question of coherence That we were talking about at the beginning Elliot and Joyce were worried, rightly so, that critics were going to say these works were pure chaos, mere jumbles of materials that didn't cohere at all. What they did was to suggest,

not only was it coherent, it was hyper-coherent, super-coherent, every detail fit. Joyce, of course, famously came up with these bizarre tables for Ulysses, which are comical, actually. Can I, Fran, can I ask you, did you, was there, do you feel, or might people have thought,

at the time, that this poem was meant to exclude a great number of readers. You really had to know your Dante, Bodleau, Wagner, Webster, Shakespeare, you had to know a little bit of Italian and German, dip into the Latin and so on, and take on. Is this a deliberate attempt at exclusion? I'm not saying a good thing about it. I am being neutral here, but was that part of it? Elliot himself, I think, pointed out that some people learnt very easily. others had to work at it a little more in order to understand this.

I think there's something deceptive about the poems so that if you go to 12 volumes of Fraser thinking here is the key, you won't find it. The same is true if you read Jesse Westons from ritual to romance or indeed read the whole of Western literature. All you've done is add an enormous number of footnotes to a text that still remains in some respects as inaccessible as it was. So in a sense the notes I think are playing a little trick. and Wendy Cote wonderfully in her wasteland limerick says,

I hope you make sense of the notes. You can go to them, and all they will do is proliferate and take you further and further into other texts. They'll pile text upon text. Whether the poem is freestanding in that sense, whether you don't need to look at anything, I think is a much more controversial point. It can seem elitist, it can seem exclusive,

that unless you have Elliott's particular Harvard Western education, you can't possibly understand it. I don't actually think that's true. Well, I think the question of the notes is, we can answer that to some degree because, as you know, when the poem was first published in periodical form, it appeared without the notes.

Then those appeared in book form. We actually have a letter from a contemporary poet named a bishop who read the poem without the notes and he gives in great detail his reaction to it almost line by line. interestingly enough, he finds the poem horrifying. It fills him with terror.

He reads it four and five times a day, and he shudders with terror. But then he gets the lines, and here's a good example. He takes the line, which appears in part one, Hurry up, please, it's time. Because he's an American living in Paris and has never been to a British pub, he thinks that that line is especially apocalyptic. He thinks it's not just a pub owner telling people to stop drinking,

it's the end of all civilization. And he says, it makes my flesh creep. A few weeks later, he runs into a British friend who explains it to him, and he's profoundly disappointed. I think his reading is actually the right reading. Hurry up, please, it's time. Isn't just a British bartender. It is the end of the world.

And it's precisely his ignorance that lets him see that. We've lost that, isn't it, with this ridiculous open all hours hours. It used to be great when, last orders, please, then hurry up, please, it's time. It gave structure to the day. When I read this as a schoolboy, I thought, this is my way of getting culture. All I need to do is look it all up and watch the South Bank show, and that'll be it. I'll have the kind of kit. And that's Elliot's point.

I think Elliot's point is, well, you know, there isn't anybody really who has these things at his fingertips. Although the poem seems, in a certain way, seems rather exclusively to offer that suggestion, that perhaps there is a kind of person still who would have all of these things flooding their mind. There never was. I mean, Elliot's got bits and scraps just like everybody has bits and scraps. Everybody could write a poem of this kind

from the things that's floating around in their heads. So actually, I found there was something really very... The fact that you could look it up, the fact that there was this something that came in between the poem and the plain reader, that thing called education, and books. I never found that a worry.

It seemed to me that that was what culture was in the first place and the myth or the fantasy that you ought to be able to understand it straight away. I couldn't understand Shakespeare. I couldn't even understand George Elliot. I brought along the copy that I got in, God of hell it was, 1958. But when I read it, I'm as baffled as everybody else, but what kept me going were the wonderful lines?

And somewhere near the beginning of the program, I said it's like Hamlet, the old lady saying about how much it enjoyed it, but it was full of quotations. And the great thing about is the lines, a couple lines here, which resonate and stay with you, and you think it's got to be great because they're such great lines. Now, mind you, I've got to put the rest of together.

Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that people respond to, I think, is the oral, oral quality of the poem, which is back to your point about the BBC. In fact, there's a wonderful scene in Brideshead Revisited where Anthony Blanche is reading the wasteland through a megaphone. You have to hear it. Everybody remembers lines.

everybody is mesmerized by individual lines in the poem. One of the misleading things is perhaps that critics, who've tried to sell the wasteland to an audience in the sense, who've tried to make it accessible to people, have in a way done the wrong things because they've tried to join up the dots and explain it and make a coherent narrative out of it. And in doing that, they've over-explained it

and they've explained away what people immediately respond to without any context. Yeah, I think your response is exactly that of the ideal reader, responsive to individual lines and not greatly worried about whether you have an unfolding argument, a narrative that is hidden away or buried, but rather to respond to the sheer, majestic music of the poem, which we can still hear

today untrammeled by any critical preconceptions. My favourite philosopher of the early 20th century is William James, and William James said two things that seem to apply absolutely to the wasteland. One is that reality comes as as though fired at us from a revolver. And the other thing he said that

the world is not made of one kind of stuff, It's a world that like a mosaic hangs together by its edges. It brings in sort of cubism and Picasso's different faces and science. But if we're to trust the poet on his own work, it's interesting that not very long afterwards, Elliot referred to it as a rhythmic grumble. Now, what do you make of that? Elliot referred to it in two very contradictory ways.

One is that it's a personal rhythmical grumble and not terribly significant. There are only 30 good lines in it, he said. He also said that myth is a way of ordering and controlling and shaping history. he made very ambitious and very bold claims for the wasteland and at the same time he undercut it as trivia which do we believe possibly neither is a very satisfactory explanation I'm sorry to say these words these two words but very briefly it was extraordinarily well received

it almost immediately became a classic almost straight away and I think that caused a certain amount of disquiet I think that he'd already begun to kind of move back from that but it became a kind of almost a manifesto for what poets could then go on and do. And in many ways, they found it hard to go beyond what Elliot had done perhaps for the rest of the century.

Got immense prizes published in America and in this country, much more successful in America than this rather curmudional reception he got in this country. But still, the way it went. Yes, and it came to stand for generation as modernism itself. This is what it was. Well, thank you very much, Steve Connor, Lawrence Riley and Van Brayton. Next week we'll be talking about the measurement problem, in contemporary physics.

It's one of the deepest problems in contemporary physics, I'm told. We'll learn more about it next week. Thank you about listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.