It’s the milestone that vaulted its author to considerable fame and influence, culminating with the Nobel Prize in 1948. The poem, straddling past and future, applies pressure on the present. If it initially seemed a response to the late Great War, in its centennial year its themes of drought and drabness sound immediate and foreboding to a generation facing climate disaster and the moral bankruptcy of the political class. And after a century of collage, of Dada and Surrealism, its disjunctive surface is less alarming. Yet because Eliot is no longer contemporary, his work is unencumbered by the reception accorded it on publication. Yeats put it when he ascended to that role after Swinburne died in 1909) is not what it used to be. Long canonized, Eliot’s poem has acquired the demeanor of a scenic viewpoint, with its park service plaque and swivel mounted telescope.Įliot’s eminence as preeminent among poets (“king of the cats,” as W. More recently it has settled into its role as modernist icon, as every passing year brings a new round of centenaries commemorating modernism. Because Eliot succeeded in making the case that modern poetry had to be difficult, The Waste Land served as the paradigm of difficulty. No teaching anthology could afford to omit it. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land entered public domain in the United States in 1998, it had been a staple of higher education for half a century.
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