T.S. Eliot

"The Waste Land" is one of the most widely read poems in the world and one of the least understood. My only prior knowledge of this poem was a mention of it in a Steven King novel I have read and even so they were merely prologue excerpts of the poem. Also, my sister, who is six years my senior, told me two things about the poem. One is that the only line she remembered was "April is the cruelest month" and that she preferred Yeats's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." As such, I went into this poem expecting an unenjoyable and morbid tale. I was not disappointed. While the tale may be morbid and I may not have enjoyed it I still understood it, or so I think I did. The eponymous "Waste Land" is Europe and it is not a physical wasteland but a metaphysical one. The people of Europe have been shaped into cold, emotionless people with poor relationships with one another. The concept of death, which Yeats explores throughout the poem, is more of a death of spirit and of hope. Eliot shows that the "interpersonal malaise" that had fallen over modern Europe was the wound that caused the Wasteland. What I noticed about the poem (through the help of the footnotes) was how "the Waste Land" moves from one person and place to the next. Eliot describes how the cold hard world of Europe is like "dry sterile thunder without rain" and the world as a mountain with "no water but only rock" (Eliot 1212). This is my belief of how Eliot sees Europe: capable of making sounds but otherwise impotent and without the ability to affect the dry mountain.