[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to a special post on predictions for 2022!]
On two
AmericanStudies contexts for a relatively non-American literary masterpiece.
As far as I
remember (and as far as my searches reveal), I’ve only written at length in one
post about T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste
Land” (1922; it was published first in his own
magazine The Criterion in October, then in the November
1st issue of The Dial,
and then in book form
in December): this
one comparing and contrasting Eliot’s poem’s opening images of Spring with
those in William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All” (1923). That might be
surprising for a work deemed one of the most influential American (and world) Modernist
texts, but I would say that my relative silence is due to the fact that the
poem largely renounces America for Europe (as its
author did almost exactly five years after that Dial publication). Indeed, while “The Waste Land” is absolutely littered
with allusions and references and quotations and intertexts (so much so that I’ve
found it hugely difficult to teach, although its importance has led me to
continue trying to do so), in the published version of the poem precisely none
of them are to American texts, voices, or histories.
I say “in the
published version” purposefully, however, because in Eliot’s drafts of “The Waste
Land” (which I first encountered in graduate school through this
truly wonderful 1970s book edited and introduced by Eliot’s
widow Valerie) he included an eventually-cut opening section that offers
one way to AmericanStudy the poem. That
opening section (which I’m not finding online, but which is included in
full in that book) describes a night out on the town with a group of college
students, a group that seemingly includes a version of Eliot himself and thus
likely comes from Harvard College (which he attended
from 1906 to 1909); that would of course make this section’s setting
Massachusetts (whether Cambridge or Boston is unclear). Eliot cut this entire
50-plus line section on the advice
of his friend Ezra Pound, and Pound may well have been right, as it’s not
nearly as gripping an opening as those famous lines about April. But even
though it didn’t end up in the published version, I’d say it’s quite
interesting and telling that this college and American setting and scene were
where Eliot initially chose to begin the poem—a reflection at the very least
that however English and European his eventual life and career became, they
began in every sense in turn of the 20th century America.
I’m not
suggesting that the poem’s setting and themes, like its allusions and
intertexts, aren’t as distinctly European as I mentioned above; I very much believe
that they are, including in a central way the physical
and psychological effects of World War I (then known as The Great War) on European
landscapes and communities. But over the last couple years, as I discussed in
my Semester Recap post on my adult learning class on the 1920s, I’ve come to
think a lot more about the effects
and aftermaths of the Influenza Pandemic on the United States, a
catastrophic event that paralleled World War I but that (unlike the war) hit
the U.S. as hard as it did Europe and the rest of the world. Eliot was living
and working in London throughout the pandemic, but much of his family and
community remained in the U.S., specifically in his native St. Louis (of which,
along with the Mississippi River, he
would later write they “have made a deeper impression on me than any other
part of the world”). So I think it’s not only possible but helpful to read “The
Waste Land” as a poem about the devastating effects of these multiple world
catastrophes, and thus as part of an American (and global to be sure) tradition
of post-pandemic literature as well.
Last anniversary
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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