Hinterland

Whatever else The Waste Land is about, TS Eliot’s poem is the sound of an Englishman coming home

Ifirst encountered TS Eliot’s The Waste Land as an undergraduate. My A-level English syllabus had avoided modernist poetry, and all the extra reading I had done to prepare for my English degree – and give me the semblance of being well-read

– focused on the classics of English verse and fiction. So when I embarked on Eliot, the shock was profound.

Once I had acclimatised to his form and diction, and to the depth and breadth of his allusiveness, it became clear what a masterpiece The Waste Land was. The best way to approach it, if it is unfamiliar, is to handle it just as I have always suggested people handle Wagner’s Ring cycle: don’t worry about what it means, just listen to it, and wallow in the music. Poetry is, of course, music. Some poets are more musical than others – Milton, notably. Writing in blank verse, Milton’s use of rhythm and the sheer sound of the words he chooses create a musicality. The same is true of Eliot.

When the poem appeared in 1922, it created a cultural explosion. The 34-year-old author’s experiments with form and use of allusion echoed those of his friend James Joyce in Ulysses, which was published in the same year, but was not so widely read as The Waste Land because it was considered obscene and therefore did not circulate in Britain.

The cognoscenti had been given some warning of Eliot’s talent, and originality, seven years earlier with “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, which prepared his readers for The Waste Land, and all that came after, with its stream of consciousness. Also, like The Waste Land, it owed something to Dante; and it contains themes of frustration, disillusion and even despair of the sort with which self-pitying young poets have since time immemorial been wont to lard their verse. It is a short step from the chilling lines that come near the end of “Prufrock”:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

to the memorable opening of The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

In “Prufrock”, there is a single stream of consciousness. In The Waste Land, even within its five separate sections, new voices in different tones intervene, each with its own consciousnesses. The themes of “Prufrock” are magnified here, perhaps with the despair in the ascendancy. But this poem is something else, something that is not usually commented upon: it is a manifestation of Eliot’s assumption of Englishness.

Although American by birth, Eliot came from a family that had emigrated there from the village of East Coker in Somerset, which would later give its name to one of the Four Quartets. He had gone to Oxford in 1914 and on leaving had become a teacher, having married and decided to settle in England.

The process of his Anglicisation was almost comical; he was baptised into, and confirmed in, the Church of England, he got a job with Lloyd’s Bank, and in 1927 became a British subject. In The Waste Land, despite its quotations in German, its references to Italy

His Anglicisation was comical: received first into the Church of England, then Lloyd’s

and intonements in Sanskrit, Eliot drinks in the sights, sounds and idioms of early 20th-century England and puts them into verse.

So in London – the “unreal city” – “a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many”. In a pub, the narrator’s voice becomes that of the proletariat, advising a woman to “get yourself some teeth” before her husband returns from the war – “He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time” – and they are interrupted by the landlord shouting “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”. Eliot quotes Spenser – “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song” – and observes how logs drift “Down Greenwich reach/ Past the Isle of Dogs”. And he rhapsodises about “Trams and Dusty Trees./ Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew undid me”. Of course, it is a poem about so much else: but it is also a poem about Eliot’s return to the land of his forebears, and a tribute to quotidian Englishness, dressed in verse of unusual genius.