"The Waste Land - Part II - A Game of Chess" by T.S. Eliot (poetry reading)

I have known this poem since I was a teenager and been though stages of admiring it and despising it.

It's a shipwreck of the poets mind, the flotsam and jetsam of half-remembered quotations floating in the sea of his consciousness. It's a montage, a Work of Art made from rubbish. But the parts that are original are as fine as the parts that are not. I think in quotations all the time, so why shouldn't he? They're the snob's equivalent of clichés. And Eliot IS a snob, dislikeable, an anti-semite (apparently, although his publisher and friend were Jews). He portrays the lower classes unflatteringly with a lofty disdain as though he were peering into an ant's nest. He isn't like Steinbeck who saw common people as saints and martyrs. Yet The Waste Land IS a work of art.

"Hurry up please, it's time" This is the landlord calling for the customers to leave the premises, which then would have been at about 10.30pm, the legal limit for a public house.
"Them pills I took to bring it off" meant to procure an abortion - chemists would sell pills to ladies "with a bun in the oven", usually quinine, "under the counter" - or illicitly.

The last lines are from Hamlet.

If you go to this site you can have a fully reseached and cross referenced guide to the waste land - just choose you monitor size
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html

You can hear Eliot himself read it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMoZVfH8_sU

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• Waste
• Land
• Game
• Chess
• Eliot

[ValisX]

everything you said about Eliot is how I feel about Lovecraft, which is why I've never given Lovecraft a moment of my time.

I respect its prominence but the man behind the work I don't like very much

[SpokenVerse]

@SavannahG14 Okay but it seems a trivial matter to me. Did you have any thoughts about the poem itself?

[Awesomeoo100]

Eliot wasn't the anti semite, his friend Ezra Pound who edited/influenced the poem was.

[TheBlindPig1]

The way of an unfaithful wife is this: she eats, then she wipes her mouth and says, "i have done no harm."

[masterfeatherpen]

@MrPingyEars I stand corrected. :)

[MrPingyEars]

@masterfeatherpen

Eliot may have had a personal, spiritual 'conversion' in a Born-Again sense, but I meant 'conversion' in the sense of changing his religious allegiance formally and being received and confirmed in the Church. Eliot was actually received into the Anglican Church in 1927, I'm afraid--he was definately Anglican. That's what 'Anglo-Catholicism' is--the Church of England sees itself as part of the Holy Catholic Church but is NOT subject to or part of the Roman Catholic Church.

[masterfeatherpen]

@MrPingyEars But I do completely disagree with the person below (Allocator2008). He did NOT despise the lower classes, he despised the lower classes' hatred of the upper classes (hence, tradition), because he was a conservative. NOT a Rightist (the anti-Semitism is a misportrayal of his traditionalism as Rightism), but a conservative, in attitude, in language, in all. This "hatred of the lower classes" gibberish is an effort to discredit him based on his hatred of collectivism and socialism.

[masterfeatherpen]

@MrPingyEars He was Anglo-Catholic (which means Roman Catholic in England, specified as an extreme traditionalist minority primarily among old old nobility and old obscure peasant families), and yes he did have a conversion experience, both explicitly in his memoirs and implicitly in his shift from early Wasteland-esque nihilism to his veritable hymns to tradition as he aged.

[MrPingyEars]

@Allocator2008

Actually he was an Anglican--not a Roman Catholic at all and as far as I know , he never converted.

[wcjones451]

there IS at least debate as to whether Eliot was actually an anti-semite. Perhaps I just don't like to think of Eliot as a bad man...