The Weaver Reads reviewed The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (Norton Critical Editions)
Goodreads Review of the Waste Land
I'm going to withhold rating this until I can make sense of a single bit of the poem. There are beautiful lines that make a lot of sense, but I have no idea what the composition is actually trying to say. Thomas C. Foster says it has something to do with Celtic myths about wastelands needing to be reinvigorated by heroes or something, and I can see that from the first lines, but the rest doesn't seem to fit together. It doesn't help that this poem is so dense with allusions to other works that it is more like a chakchouka that tastes so far from its constituent parts than an independently-crafted piece of writing (then again, aren't we just re-telling the same stories over and over and over?).
I read some of the notes in this Norton Critical Edition, and tried to read some of the analyses, but didn't …
I'm going to withhold rating this until I can make sense of a single bit of the poem. There are beautiful lines that make a lot of sense, but I have no idea what the composition is actually trying to say. Thomas C. Foster says it has something to do with Celtic myths about wastelands needing to be reinvigorated by heroes or something, and I can see that from the first lines, but the rest doesn't seem to fit together. It doesn't help that this poem is so dense with allusions to other works that it is more like a chakchouka that tastes so far from its constituent parts than an independently-crafted piece of writing (then again, aren't we just re-telling the same stories over and over and over?).
I read some of the notes in this Norton Critical Edition, and tried to read some of the analyses, but didn't get so far. As a result, this is just for the poem itself.
