T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" from Collected Poems: 1909-1962. Faber and Faber, 2020.
These modest reflections on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and classical education are occasioned by the publication of this great, enigmatic poem of endless interpretive depth, in the inaugural issue of The Criterion, Eliot’s critical monthly, one-hundred years ago in October 1922. I encourage you to carve out time to read, annotate, and reckon with this poem. Re-read it as you decipher its 433 lines that will shockwave your sense of wonder. Further, read it silently while listening to one of the recordings you can locate online (I recommend Alec Guinness’ evocative recording running just under 25 minutes). Having done just what I recommended above throughout October, in an honoring of Eliot’s The Waste Land in my off hours and leisure of fall break, here are a few musings for the classical-minded – or those taking first steps in their journey of classical education – on how this poem might deepen understanding of the classics’ value in our late-modern world of rattling noise, hollow indifference, and fragmentation.
First, The Waste Land flourishes with meticulous classical allusions, references, and quotations. Reading no further than the forbidding, perplexing, tone-setting epigraph, we discover lines of ancient Greek and Latin:
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.
Translated: For I once saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered: ‘I want to die.’
Could there be a weightier, high-brow departure than these lines from Petronius’ Satyricon? Interpreting them alone would fill this reflection. The Cumean Sibyl is first of the ancient seers named alongside the blind-prophet of Thebes, Tiresias. He sees “the substance of the poem” according to Eliot’s notes. Paired with this epigraph is Eliot’s tribute to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro (Italian: the better craftsman), with lines echoing Dante’s Purgatorio. Thus, he points his readers to ancient and medieval classics as sources of meaning heading into the brokenness of what lies ahead. Only three words in this epigraph are Eliot’s own; the rest draws from forebears in Western civilization.
Second, groupings of authors and works alluded to in The Waste Land are fruitful to study. They fall into the following categories and an asterisk indicates that Eliot referenced them in his notes (“a wild goose chase” for some in Eliot’s own words, but a springboard for immense classical learning for others):
a) Biblical: Ezekiel*; Ecclesiastes*; Isaiah; Psalm 137; the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke
b) Greek and Latin classics: Homer’s Odyssey; Vergil’s Aeneid*; Ovid’s Metamorphoses*; Sappho’s Fragment 149, a prayer to the Evening Star*; Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Rex; Augustine’s Confessions*; and the Pervigilium Veneris*
c) Medieval classics in Dante’s Inferno*, Purgatorio*, and Arthurian legends about the Grail Quest*
d) Eastern classics such as Buddha’s “Fire-Sermon”* and the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad*
e) William Shakespeare’s The Tempest*, Antony and Cleopatra*, Hamlet, and Coriolanus
f) Richard Wagner’s operas including Tristan und Isolde* and Die Götterdämmerung*
g) Contemporary German literature in the instance of Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (1922)*
h) Modern French poetry including Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal*, Paul Verlaine’s sonnet, “Parsifal”*, and Gerard de Nerval’s sonnet, El Desdichado*
i) James Anthony Froude’s Elizabeth (Volume I) in his History of England*
j) Indirect allusion via Madame Sosostris’ tarot cards to Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks
k) English novels from the 18th century in the case of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield*
l) English works from the late-16th and early-17th century including poetry by John Webster*, Thomas Middleton*, John Milton (Paradise Lost*), Edmund Spenser*, Andrew Marvell*, John Day*, Thomas Kyd*, and others.
For seasoned students of classics, design a reading program to tackle this list. If you are new to classical education, then pick some from above and enjoy what you discover reading in conversation with others.
Third, The Waste Land reminds readers of desires and longings that resonate with images found often in classical education. Five include the lines about longings a) to converse: “we stopped in the colonnade, / And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, / And drank coffee, and talked for an hour” (9-11); b) to seek reality beyond the unreality of shadows: “There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (25-30); c) to return home: “Albert’s coming back” (142); d) to order: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order? (423-425); and e) to journey: “Damyata: The boat responded / Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar / The sea was calm, your heart would have responded / Gaily, when invited, beating obedient / To controlling hands” (418-422). Unlike classical dialogues – dialogues between Socrates and interlocutors in Plato’s philosophy, dialogues between Augustine and God in Confessions, dialogues between Dante and Vergil in Inferno, or dialogues in Shakespeare’s plays – we hear in The Waste Land a cacophony, babbling noise, and plurality of disjointed and fragmented voices; we lack therein a unity of vision: “Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images” (20-23). Eliot’s poem reminds us, too, of longing for beauty and the fine arts, essential for a classical education, and a longing for high standards to judge reality apart from – and outside of – our individual, modern selves. We find the opposite in Romantic or Transcendental longings for the “inner ocean” within each in Emerson’s poetry, for instance. Turning to the amazing poem, “Marina,” or his masterpiece, The Four Quartets, Eliot explores these high standards. One might characterize that exploration as a meaningful search for what is in contrast with whatever.
Fourth, the dusty, deserted, dry nothingness of the waste land—“A little life with dried tubers” (7)—is juxtaposed with the two realities I want to highlight: a) life in European cities, particularly, London and b) water in various forms. Many cities are mentioned: London, Thebes, Carthage, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna. The first references to London begin in the “Burial of the Dead,” in the passage on the Unreal City, “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn” (61). He depicts so many contemporaries, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (62) with “each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (65). He describes London Bridge, King William Street, and the church where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours. Whereas in “A Game of Chess,” a conversation in a London pub figures prominently, in “The Fire-Sermon” the “sweet Thames” runs softly until we encounter the Unreal City once more. Turning to ways Eliot describes water, the best passages are in “What the Thunder Said,” particularly the lines of poetic imagining and ascent, “If there were water … But there is no water” (346-358). Water in The Waste Land ranges from rain and snow to wet hair and fog, from frost and “hot water at ten” (135) to the Thames and Ganges, from spit and sweat to wished-for springs and black clouds, from tears and fishing canals to tea and the sea, whirlpooling Phlebas the Phoenician down into the vortex.
Lastly, reading The Waste Land closely will help you to cultivate your capacity to listen, which is essential to a classical education. I am left with a better capacity to listen after the humbling experience of reckoning repeatedly with this poem. It is filled with sounds, but little music: from disjointed voices of the “Burial of the Dead” to sound of the nightingale’s onomatopoeia and the London pub’s last call in “A Game of Chess” to the unheard wind and fisherman’s silence, the gramophone record and “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” (277-278) of “The Fire-Sermon” to the cry of gulls in “Death by Water” to thunderous silences proceeding datta, dayadhvam, damyata, shantih, shantih, shantih in “What the Thunder Said.” Unless The Waste Land connects “nothing with nothing” (302), then it connects us with something. That something, in my view, is discovered in classics that undergird this poem, in what they teach us, even in a modern waste land, even in The Waste Land, one hundred years after its publication, valuable today.
Dr. Ben Mitchell is a Teacher Resource Portal Manager at Great Hearts America working with a team of authors on history curriculum. He served as the founding Headmaster of Lincoln Prep, where he taught across the curriculum and led the community for seven years. Prior to joining Great Hearts, Ben taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in areas of political philosophy and grand strategy, as well as the University of Richmond, having finished his Ph.D. and M.A. at the University of Virginia and B.A. cum laude in Classics-History-Politics with a Minor in Renaissance Studies at Colorado College. Beyond endless learning, Ben loves traveling, cooking, reading, gardening year-round in his backyard, good conversations, skiing in Flagstaff, and enjoying awesome adventures with his wife and daughters.