What is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land? Jed Rasula’s new book, What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern, abounds with analogies that attempt to answer this question. It is telling of The Waste Land’s abiding strangeness that it seems easier to describe the poem through comparison than through direct engagement with the form and content of the poem itself. In Rasula’s words, The Waste Land is “an intimidating lump in the syllabus” and “a chastening puzzle”; it has “acquired the demeanor of a scenic viewpoint, with its park service plaque and swivel mounted telescope”; it is “an event, like a tornado or an earthquake.” All this on the book’s first page!
Rasula’s analogies are frequently incisive, as when he compares The Waste Land to “a coloring book with boldly delineated objects in which readers can fill in the colors as they please,” or suggests that for Eliot, “poetry is akin to stammering, like some aesthetically advantageous speech defect,” and are insightful even, or sometimes especially, when they threaten to mix various metaphors. He describes the poem as “the seismograph of a shared neurosis,” for example, gesturing towards a fusion of geology and psychology whose incongruity is an apt response to The Waste Land’s synesthetic, at once elemental and newly-constructed, despair.
(Only very occasionally does Rasula allow his talent for capacious, multi-layered analogies, and the delight he takes in them, carry him into sloppiness or imprecision, as when “the music of The Waste Land rises up in wisps, much like the coiling tone of the bassoon that opens Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, its languid vegetal pulse … like an insect chorus in a bog.”)
In turning to metaphor, Rasula joins a lineage of readers who, since The Waste Land’s publication 100 years ago, in December of 1922, have struggled for accurate language to describe its power and incomprehensibility. What the Thunder Said provides a broad survey of this lineage, and of the analogies it adds to Rasula’s own. According to the art critic Clive Bell, Eliot’s method in The Waste Land demands that “birdlike he must pile up wisps and straws”; Harriet Monroe wrote that the poem was “kaleidoscopic, profuse, a rattle and rain of colors that fall somehow into place”; for poet and bookstore owner Harold Monro, “this poem actually is a dream … and it lingers in the mind more like a dream than a poem.”
A dream, a bird’s nest, a kaleidoscope rattling and raining colors. Writer Elinor Wylie described Eliot as “a cadaver dissecting himself in our sight,” which makes his poetry a kind of coroner’s report. As revealing as is the sheer variety of these analogies – and Rasula quotes or paraphrases many more than the few mentioned here – is the fact that so many of them could be read equally plausibly as forms of praise or of condemnation. What, then, is The Waste Land? Taken together, the responses Rasula presents and collects offer no stable answer. But this instability points to something essential about Eliot’s accomplishment — given which, a more fruitful question might be not what The Waste Land is, but instead: if The Waste Land is modern poetry, what is a modern poem?
The latter formulation is more aligned with Rasula’s project in What the Thunder Said. “The Waste Land is not so much the subject of this book as its center of gravity,” he writes. “My approach … is less that of a literary scholar than a cultural historian’s.” Rather than attempting to analyze or explain Eliot’s work, Rasula sets out to understand the cultural and artistic trends out of which The Waste Land was born, and those trends to which it, in turn, gave birth. This undertaking requires him to offer a genealogy of modern art, which displays his exceptional ability to survey complex cultural histories in succinct, lucid, and engaging prose without scanting nuance or resorting to academic jargon.
His genealogy begins with Richard Wagner’s art and ideology, and with Friedrich Nietzsche’s progression from a worshipful admiration of Wagner to a condemnation of everything he thought the composer stood for. For Rasula, Wagner’s ideas of “total artwork” and “endless melody” establish an approach to music which Eliot and other modern poets will later transpose into the medium of writing. Along with his talent for crafting analogies in his own writing, Rasula is particularly gifted at explicating the analogies between Eliot’s poetry and other art forms.
His account of The Waste Land’s debt to music, and of the broader obsession with music which characterized various forms of avant-garde art in the decades before The Waste Land’s publication, is insightful. As Rasula puts it, “a poem, for [Eliot], summoned a mood, a kind of mental sonority, in which one could think differently,” just as for Wagner “music [contained] a cognitive as well as a sensory dimension.”
From Wagner and Nietzsche, What the Thunder Said proceeds with both concision and comprehensiveness through the upheavals of World War I, symbolist and surrealist art, and lesser known avant-garde movements like Vorticism, until arriving at the relationship between Eliot and Ezra Pound. “The trajectory of this book,” Rasula explains, “goes from a preliminary pair (Wagner, Nietzsche) to a later pair (Pound, Eliot), who get the most attention.”
Rasula’s treatment of this “later pair” is especially illuminating when he discusses the development and international influence of Pound’s imagism, and of Pound’s wide-ranging and idiosyncratic translations. But this treatment – and its omissions – are also the occasion for the book’s only serious flaw.
Rasula introduces Pound with an anecdote describing his rescue of a destitute woman from a snowstorm. The 23-year old Pound, then a French instructor at Indiana’s Wabash College, had invited the woman to warm herself in his boardinghouse room, and the minor scandal that resulted from his having a female in his living quarters caused Wabash’s administrators to demand his resignation. Rasula interprets this incident with a statement for which he offers no explanation: “that an act of generosity could land him in hot water foreshadowed Ezra Pound’s life in general.”
At best, this is an oddly flippant way of describing Pound’s “life in general,” which was marked by his writing some of the most daring and dynamic English poetry of the 20th century, and marred by his unrepentant support of fascism from the 1930s until his death in 1972. Charged with treason for his activism on behalf of Mussolini during World War II, Pound spent 12 years incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital, and celebrated his release in 1958 by giving a fascist salute and returning to Italy.
Rasula writes that Pound and Eliot are “irrevocably bound by their alliance” and it is a notable omission that Rasula never discusses Eliot’s anti-semitism, which his poems themselves display. Eliot writes in “Gerontion”: “My house is a decayed house, / And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp …” But the poem “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” is perhaps Eliot’s most sustained pronouncement of anti-semitism in verse, as he describes the eponymous Bleistein’s neanderthal-like “saggy bending of the knees / And elbows, with the palms turned out, / Chicago Semite Viennese …” and contends that “The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot.”
To be clear, Eliot’s anti-semitism does not need to become the centerpiece of any book about Eliot, nor should it overshadow his poetic legacy, just as Pound’s fascism is not the entire story of his astonishing career. George Steiner has astutely noted that “Eliot’s uglier touches tend to occur at the heart of very good poetry”; for both Pound and Eliot, the bigotry and the art coexist, side by side.
Rasula discusses Pound’s bigotry and fascism, but presents it as an isolated incident, the product of Pound’s idiosyncratic mental instability. The avoidance of this topic in Eliot’s life and work is a missed opportunity for Rasula to fully develop his own concerns and arguments. What the Thunder Said teases out those cultural and artistic trends that cohered in Pound’s and Eliot’s modernist poetry, and culminated in The Waste Land; part of Rasula’s goal is to “trac[e] a foreground of instigations and influences, provocations and cultural resonances that contributed to its uncanny intimacy.”
A reader who is aware of Eliot’s and Pound’s bigotry is left wondering, then, exactly how and why anti-semitism, and other forms of regressive politics, may have contributed to this “foreground,” and to the strange power of Eliot’s poetry. What is the relationship between The Waste Land’s vision of civilizational and personal collapse and the rise of fascism in Europe? These questions are especially acute because the lineage Rasula traces begins with Wagner, who was himself a notorious anti-semite, and, as Rasula notes, a cultural influence on the rise of Nazism. They are also urgent questions in this moment of far right and white supremacist ascendance, and it is a disappointment that Rasula fails to reckon with them.
This omission is the only significant flaw in What the Thunder Said. Rasula sets out, as he writes in his introduction, to “recover [The Waste Land’s] force as explosive event,” and in this he succeeds delightfully. The book demonstrates his uncommon ability to compress highly complicated artistic, cultural, and intellectual histories into accessible and enjoyable prose. In doing so, he presents The Waste Land less as a poem, and more as a living character within the drama of European and American modernity, a character whose liveliness rivals or even surpasses that of the many people Rasula surveys.
Rasula’s explication of the various trends which formed the foreground for The Waste Land has the paradoxical effect of restoring the poem’s essential strangeness, and in this strangeness lies its power. What the Thunder Said shows without telling that, like any great literary protagonist, The Waste Land retains its capacity to shock and to transform.
[Published by Princeton University Press on December 6, 2022, 344 pages. $39.95 hardcover]