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Chapter 1: What personal experiences do the hosts share about their own wastelands?
I love a wasteland, Jonty. Have you got a personal favourite wasteland?
Well, there have been so many in my life, Sophie.
I can imagine.
The wasteland par excellence in my life has to be the Park Royal Industrial Estate in West London, where I've curiously spent rather too much of my life. So Park Royal is a vast, vast estate. industrial estate in between two motorways. And it is incredibly dreary. I mean, you just feel so depressed when you go there.
And it's normally to try and get a car fixed at a particularly low cost by some mechanic who's, you know, undercut the other mechanics. But I used to go there a lot because I had some rehearsal studios that I used to go to with my band. But also like other parts of my life led me to the
Australian friends who, in the late 90s, who I discovered had turned up in England and were staying above a pub in the Park Royal Estate. And when I heard this, I sent in the emergency services, me and my dad's car, and whipped them out into the family home.
Something more respectable in West London.
Yes. And I notice actually that the Park Rural Estate is now set for a massive regen scheme. It's been called the Canary Wharf of West London. So Lord knows what it will be like in 10 years time, Sophie. It may be the Paris of West London for all we know.
Yes, absolutely. The Champs-Élysées. So my wasteland was one that I drove through many times a week for many, many years because I commuted from New York City to Princeton, as you know. which is about an hour and a half's drive south from New York to sort of the middle of New Jersey. And one drives along the New Jersey Turnpike, which is a major interstate highway.
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Chapter 2: How does T.S. Eliot's background influence The Waste Land?
Under the influence of his friend, the fascist poet Ezra Pound, a man who later achieved notoriety for his enthusiastic support of Hitler during the Second World War. Quite a few people made that mistake, it has to be said, but Pound is one of them. Eliot's second collection of poems revelled in anti-Semitism, misogyny and willful obscurity. He even wrote poems in French.
pretentious moi as we used to say at school in imitation of basil faulty in this episode we show how just in time with the beret almost on his head and the baguette tucked under his arm elliott managed to cast it aside regain control of the wheel and steer the vehicle away from the boulevard of paris into the wasteland And as ever, our question is how? And I'm going to add to that, Junty, why?
King Arthur had Excalibur, but Eliot had a more powerful weapon called literary criticism. So in a string of articles collected in 1920 as the Sacred Wood, an absolute smash hit collection of literary criticism, he presented an eccentric but brilliant critique of Western culture from Homer to the present.
This grunt work in the storehouse of literature gave him the intellectual chops to create what is arguably the most influential and maybe, I'm going maybe on that one, the greatest poem of the 20th century.
In the hyperbolic spirit of a Discovery Channel documentary, we think it's fair to say that The Wasteland, published in two magazines in 1922, then by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1923, changed the world forever. Yes. It is a longish poem of 434 lines in five parts with many different voices.
Eliot breaks the singular fixedness of the poetic voice which had dominated English poetry for centuries. Think of the smooth speaking lover of Shakespeare's sonnets or the breast beating anguish of the Romantics. In The Wasteland, the poet is a backstage impresario rather than a leading tragedian. As we read, different characters and voices arise and merge into others.
In this regard, the experience of reading the poem has frequently been compared to moving a dial along an old-fashioned radio. Sometimes these voices are rooted in the contemporary world of 1920s London, sometimes from other parts of European history, sometimes from an allegorical place, the so-called wasteland of the title.
But as becomes clear, all these voices from Albert and Lil in an East End pub to the mythological Tiresias are trapped in wastelands, whether metaphorical or actual. For readers at the time, Eliot captured the spiritual malaise of Europe after the First World War.
Nobody could definitively explain the poem, although many had their theories, but it captured more than any realist novel, the spirit of the age. It has some of the most famous lines in poetry, including April is the cruelest month. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Unreal city and these fragments I've shored against my ruins.
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Chapter 3: What literary criticism did Eliot present in The Sacred Wood?
We're firmly in Alexander Pope's Duncian territory here, and disparate spirits roam the badlands. The poem morphs into one of the Upanishads, the Hindu scriptures, that Eliot was fascinated with back from his degree in philosophy at Harvard University, as discussed last episode. And three Hindu words are presented as a way by which readers and Eliot himself might escape the wasteland.
The first of these is data, which means give. Then we've got dayadvam, which means compassion, and damyata, which means control. So just to recap that, give, compassion and control. Great words. The poem ends by repeating these words and then shanty, shanty, shanty, which means peace. It's not totally clear to me, Jonty, that one could get away with that kind of cultural appropriation these days.
Elliot just goes straight in.
You totally couldn't. Let's talk about that more later on because it's a slight... It's the equivalent of wearing, you know, a feathered headdress. Okay, so we're reading. I'm not going to do the intro.
All right.
Partly because there's too much German in it.
There is quite a bit of German. So instead, I'm going to go from the last... That's the pound presence, all the Wagner references. It's that sort of leakage from the fascist period.
I'm going to read a bit instead, which admittedly does end in a little bit of French, but I feel I can make a better fist of French than I can of German.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How did The Waste Land change the landscape of poetry in the 20th century?
So he has characters called things like Lady Kleinwurm and Lady Katzeg. And then in Gerontion, he talks about his landlord Jews squatting on the windowsill. So what did you make of all this when this debate was going on?
Yeah, I remember this. Well, I mean, it kind of took Elliot out of action at the time, didn't it? You know, that was pretty kind of damning evidence. And I suppose what it speaks to is his, I mean, now it's obvious that it speaks to his relationship with Ezra Pound, who I suppose was this unbelievably, you know, influential, formative person.
editor for Elliot, you know, first and foremost, but it sort of leaked into his opinions and beliefs about the world. I mean, honestly, it's pretty distasteful.
I was looking in preparation for this episode at the kind of counterclaims that were made, and none of them hold water. So the main one is that he's writing poetry, he's creating persona. Most of these poems have been the head of a fictional character, and therefore it doesn't mean that he himself is anti-Semitic.
But then in the sort of counter-counterclaim, people have made the point, well, why does he keep coming back to these tropes then? I mean, why have so many persona who are anti-Semitic? And a lot of the evidence for this is actually built on things he said later. So just to add in two other things into the mix, which come from slightly later. One is that in 1936, when he was reviewing T.S.
Eliot, a book which was about, it was an early expose of the extermination of the Jews in Germany that was starting to occur under the Nazis. T.S. Eliot wrote this very dismissive review of the book and said that the claims were all exaggerated and it wasn't really true.
And I think the worst thing he wrote actually was in 1930, he gave a lecture, which was then collected in a book called After Savage Gods in 1934. And it was a lecture he gave in Virginia. In this lecture, he says a population, their population should be homogenous. So he's not in favor of multiculturalism.
Where two or more cultures exist in the same place, they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background and reasons of race and religion combined to make any large number of free thinking Jews undesirable. So he says this in 1930 when anti-Semitism is on the rise to a very terrifying degree in Europe.
And he's also giving this lecture about cultural homogeneity in Virginia, which if you think about Virginia at the time was absolutely in the grips of race conflict, Jim Crow era. And this is Eliot speaking as Eliot himself. And so I think the claims of anti-Semitism really hold and they really are inflected through his poetry.
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Chapter 5: What are the different voices and characters in The Waste Land?
So James Joyce has this character, Leopold Bloom, who lives in modern day Dublin, and he follows him over 24 hours. But the chapters are each modelled on different sections of the Odyssey by Homer. And this is the breakthrough for T.S. Eliot.
He realizes that if he can bring this bedrock of ancient myth into the modern world, he can create a structure for himself to do the things that he wants to do. He writes an essay in 1923 called Ulysses, Order and Myth.
And Eliot writes, in using the myth in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him, i.e. himself. They will not be imitators any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own independent further investigations.
It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy, which is contemporary history. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. So you can really see there the influence that Ulysses is having on him.
Yeah, that's great. I'm really glad that you pulled those two passages out to give us a flavor for Eliot's feelings about Joyce. The other figure I just want to briefly mention in terms of influences is Henry James, actually. So we've said that in some ways, Eliot's early life has changed.
Important parallels with Henry James, the most obvious of which being that he relocates from East Coast America to London and ultimately becomes a British citizen, though that's after he writes The Wasteland. But before he writes The Sacred Wood, those major essays, he writes an essay called In Memory of Henry James, and it's published again in The Egoist in 1918.
So it's just before he's going to be starting to write The Wasteland. He says, the influence of James hardly matters. To be influenced by a writer is to have a chance inspiration from him, or to take what one wants, or to see things one has overlooked. there will always be a few intelligent people to understand James.
And to be understood by a few intelligent people is all the influence a man requires. So there's a certain amount of prophylactic autobiography happening there. But he's also trying to think about what it means to be influenced by an earlier writer. And this is going to feed into tradition and the individual talent, I think, when he gets to that essay.
But the thing he says about the way that James writes... I mean, famously, what he said is he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. And this is always kind of cited as Eliot's shutdown of Henry James. You know, take that, James. You have a mind so fine no idea can violate it.
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Chapter 6: How does Eliot incorporate mythological references in The Waste Land?
No, it's great. So he's basically sort of explaining how as someone who you're sort of entering into the stream of literary history and actually the history of art in general. And once you enter into that stream, your voice really ceases to be you and instead becomes part of these people. accumulating voices across. I mean, he's thinking in terms of thousands of years.
So he says the author must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe, the mind of his own country is
A mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind is a mind which changes and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare or Homer or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsman.
So obviously to us now, to focus entirely on Europe and the mind of one's own country, the sort of nationalism of Eliot, that's a little disquieting, a little unsettling. We would want to move beyond a European understanding of literary tradition. But the ideas that Eliot's getting across are unbelievably interesting.
The last thing I would like to say about the essay, one is that he gives a special privileging, I think it's fair to say, to Jacobean and Elizabethan literature. He thinks of it as a high watermark of, English literary tradition. But he's also got something really interesting to say about Romanticism. So this is what he says about Romanticism.
And the reason I think it's worth reading this aloud is that The Wasteland, in a lot of ways, is rejecting Romanticism. It's rejecting that very personalised I, the sense of being able to use nature as a sort of transcendent object, the idea that suffering can be transformed by both by art and by the presence of sublime, a sublime natural world.
All these ideas that come from Wordsworth and Coleridge, even the idea of negative capability that we've talked about so much with Keats, this idea that you can sit in a kind of uncertainty, you can sit with this capacity to absorb the world around you and that that's what it means to be a great artist. In a lot of ways, he seems to be turning his back on that.
But this is what he says about romanticism in Tradition. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and in working them up into poetry to express feelings which are not in actuality emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.
Consequently, we must believe that emotion recollected in tranquility, which is something that Wordsworth talked about in the lyrical ballads, is an inexact formula, for it's neither emotion nor recollection nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration and a new thing resulting from the concentration.
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Chapter 7: What role does the Fisher King play in The Waste Land's narrative?
I wouldn't necessarily say that that makes Hamlet a failure.
No, he's absolutely convinced that the essence of Hamlet is the guilt of a mother. And he feels that this is something that cannot be properly expressed. And it very much ties into his misogyny, I think, as well. Around this time, he wrote to his father, I struggle to keep the writing as much as possible in male hands, as I distrust the feminine in literature.
And I think the implication is that by Shakespeare, by trying to make a woman's guilt the central theme, has outreached himself. And the examples Eliot gives of successful Shakespeare plays are the very masculine ones. So he says that unlike the jealousy of Othello, heroic male. The infatuation of Antony, heroic male. The pride of Coriolanus, heroic male.
Hamlet doesn't work because it is about the guilt of a mother. So I think there's a lot of misogyny here as well.
Well, of course, the irony of it all is that Hamlet's unbelievably like Prufrock, who's kind of a speaking persona for Eliot himself. But what I want everyone to take with them as we move into the opening sections of this really, really difficult poem that Eliot is about to write is that he wants to, he's obsessed with emotion. He's obsessed with this, as he says about
Tennyson, this kind of elegiac mood, this mood of mourning, the emotions of mourning. And he wants to express it through a series of objects, a situation and a chain of events. So let's take that and pivot into the opening sections of The Wasteland.
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So, Sophie, T.S. Eliot writes The Wasteland basically over the course of 1921. I'm going to do a plug. I highly recommend anyone who's into The Wasteland reads The Wasteland, a biography of a poem by Matthew Hollis. This book came out a couple of years ago, so it's quite recent. It is a book simply about how The Wasteland came together as a poem.
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Chapter 8: How does Eliot's use of Hindu concepts offer a resolution in The Waste Land?
No, you've got to keep going. There's no space.
You've got to keep going. What do you think? And when we were children staying at the Archduke's, my cousins, he took us out on a sled and I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went in the mountains. There you feel free. I read much of the night and go south in winter. Right. So there's a lot happening in that opening, isn't there?
The first thing to say, I think, John D., for our listeners, is it is not the point of the wasteland to understand the wasteland. Is that fair? So the burial of the dead is a reference to the Book of Common Prayer. It's the section of the main liturgy of the Church of England that manages the funeral ceremony, the funeral service.
And so what we expect is going to happen here is a kind of funereal, formal kind of ceremony that somehow is echoing the language of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, these great publications of Reformation England, of the Elizabethan era and the origin story of modern English writing. So we're expecting something quite formal and something quite liturgical.
And what we get actually is a redoing of Chaucer, Jonti. It's time for our Chaucer sound. So our avid listeners to the Chaucer episode will remember, of course, the opening of the Canterbury Tales. And Eliot picks that ball right up. April is the cruelest month and breeding lilacs out of a dead land. And he doesn't leave the roots behind. The draught of March has passed to the rota.
So what Chaucer's saying is that the April rain rains all over March and pierces it to the root. Eliot picks up on the roots, dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers.
You can imagine the outrage that the Chaucerians felt when they read this poem first. April is the cruelest month. They would have been throwing their books in the air in outrage, wouldn't they? Here is T.S. Eliot taking one of the most famous opening lines in literature, the opening of The Canterbury Tales, and turning it right on its head. The Chaucer voices would have been shrill and panicky.
Yeah, they sure would. And one of the respects in which he turns it on its head is to say that what it does is to mix memory and desire. So you will recall again that the opening of The Canterbury Tales is all about how when the spring comes and the world is wet and the trees are budding into green leaves,
Humans are flooded by sexual desire, by this desire to hook up, basically, and hit the road and get it on. And Elliot's taking that emotion of desire. He's mingling it with memory. He's turning it into something much more muted, much more complicated. I don't think it's a kind of, it's not a sort of vigorous ram-like sexual desire in this opening.
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