The Waste Land (1922)

version

version

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catalog said:
Yeah true, but funny how some go canon and then theyre untouchable.
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I think he's generally considered to have been both a brilliant poet and an antisemite. There are probably people who try to deny the latter, but I think it's broadly accepted that that's what he was. I guess the fact he's still read despite that makes him 'untouchable'? I don't know. He certainly hasn't escaped criticism.
 
luka

luka

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Maybe I'm getting Jeremy Clarkson in my middle age but I do groan when the only thing someone knows about any given artist is that he is 'a bit dodge' and that this vague suspicion is enough reason to dismiss the work without having even glanced at it.
 
luka

luka

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Yeah it's partly an anti or counter wasteland. Fertility rite. Vegetable Empire, clues in the name.
 
version

version

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I've read The Waste Land a couple of times, enjoyed it and I'll reread it soon for the sake of this thread, but I don't really understand it at all. I'm at the stage where I just think "that's a great line" or "that's a great image" without much insight as to what he's really talking about.
 
luka

luka

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How much of it is even intended to be 'understandable' in the sense you mean it in at any rate?
 
luka

luka

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Simon silverdollarcircle said:
Also the wasteland is as much music hall and pub closing time as it is classical references.
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And like in Burroughs you overhear these snatches of conversations that then sort of shift their frame of reference from the local to the universal, become comments on... Like... The human condition or something grand like that.
 
luka

luka

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Hurry up please it's time.

Shunted out of their original context to take on this other significance.
 
luka

luka

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This persistent confusion and intersecting of the planes, the mundane and the mythical. Scrambling of time periods.
 
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version

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'A heap of broken images' is a phrase I turn over and over in my head on a regular basis -- love it, speaks to my general view of the internet/the media etc. That and Burroughs' thing about reality being a cut-up, looking at a person walking behind a car and only seeing a fragment of them.
 
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I remember reading the title The Fire Sermon several times when I first read it too. I didn't really think of what it meant, just loved the way it sounded.
 
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