The Waste Land

I awoke early today and listened to a great podcast: the theme of In Our Time was The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.

I had heard of this poem before naturally, it is hugely famous and revered, and this program gave you a flavour of how this poem was radical modern. It was written shortly after World War II and there is a sense of the horror and shock of a World that can never be the same again ...

The narrative does not flow like a conversational story but is jagged and jumpy like reality with many quirky moment not quite making sense. I'm sure this podcast only touches on the elusive depths of this famous poem.

One verse I particularly like is:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/wslnd11.txt)

'I had not thought death had undone so many' apparently is a line verbatim taken from Dante's Inferno, but what I liked is image of the flow of poor commuters, a sad but powerful image of modern London. As true today as in 1922. That another nice parallel, the financial troubles of 1922 possibly equal our modern credit crunch. Eliot a linguist, was working in the city for Lloyds banks translate financial journals. He was a follower of Keynes and deeply opposed to the treaty of Versailles:

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) is a book published by John Maynard Keynes. Keynes attended the Versailles Conference as a delegate of the British Treasury and argued for a much more generous peace. It was a best seller throughout the world and was critical in establishing a general opinion that the Versailles Treaty was a "Carthaginian peace". It helped to consolidate American public opinion against the treaty and involvement in the League of Nations. The perception by much of the British public that Germany had been treated unfairly in turn was a crucial factor in public support for appeasement. The success of the book established Keynes' reputation as a leading economist especially on the left.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace

Anyway Eliot was depressed, off sick with a nervous disorder and spent 3 months working on The Waste Land, a bleak and remarkable modern poem.