THE WASTE LAND
By
T. S. Eliot
(Winner of the Dial's 1922 Award)
Burton Rascoe in the "New York Tribune," characterizes THE WASTE LAND as, "A thing of bitterness and beauty, which is a crystallization or a synthesis of all the poems Mr. Eliot has hitherto written." He goes still further, when he says, THE WASTE LAND, "Is, perhaps, the finest poem of this generation; at all events it is the most significant in that it gives voice to the universal despair or resignation arising from the spiritual and economic consequences of the war, the cross purposes of modern civilization, the cul-de-sac into which both science and philosophy seem to have got themselves and the break-down of all great directive purposes which give zest and joy to the business of living. It is an erudite despair: Mr. Eliot stems his poem from a recent anthropological study of primitive beliefs, as embodied in the Grail legend and other flaming quests which quickened men in other times; he quotes, or misquotes, lines from the "Satyricon of Petronius," "Tristan und Isolde," the sacred books of the Hindus, Dante, Baudelaire, Verlaine, nursery rhymes, the Old Testament and modern jazz songs. His method is highly elliptical, based on the curious formula of Tristan Corbiere, wherein reverential and blasphemous ideas are juxtaposed in amazing antitheses, and there are mingled all the shining verbal toys, impressions and catch lines of a poet who has read voraciously and who possesses an insatiable curiosity about life. It is analysis and realism, psychology and criticism, anguish, bitterness and disillusion, with passages of great lyrical beauty."
