The “City Man” in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence

PMLA ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Day
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Exchange ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Nervous Breakdown ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The City ◽  
Recent Critic

T. S. Eliot composed the first draft of The Waste Land at Margate and in Lausanne during the autumn of 1921, when funds secured through Ezra Pound had enabled him to take a long holiday for rest and recuperation. He sorely needed both, and in fact was under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, for overwork in his double capacity as bank clerk and man of letters had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though we must allow that he was distressed by postwar chaos and the decay of Europe, themes of a more specific and less elevated nature were certainly among his thoughts. He could hardly escape from the news of the day, which we find reproduced plainly or masked in much of his early work; and he was, in the words of a recent critic, “preoccupied … with the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London”—Lloyd's Bank, where he held a minor post in the foreign exchange department at a starting salary of £120 per annum.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
A. W. Strouse
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Hellenistic Greece ◽  
Modern Era

This introduction describes the surprisingly frequent invocation of circumcision and uncircumcision as a multifaceted metaphor from antiquity, through the medieval period, into modernity. Circumcision as a signifier of sacrality figures heavily in Jewish thought, while in classical and Hellenistic Greece, the presence of an intact foreskin signified self-control and the avoidance of excess. These conceptions influenced novel Christian theological and literary invocations of the prepuce throughout antiquity and the European Middle Ages, persisting down to the modern era, as in the notable case of Ezra Pound musing that he had gestated Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in his foreskin.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Bachelor's Degree ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Postgraduate Studies ◽  
Post War

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an essayist, editor, playwright, poet, and publisher. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He is perhaps best known for his long poem The Waste Land. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Eliot’s postgraduate studies in philosophy took him to the Sorbonne in 1910/11 and to Oxford in 1914. Once he arrived in England, however, he spent much of his time in London. There he met two of the most influential people of his literary life: the American poet Ezra Pound and a young Englishwoman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom Eliot would marry in 1915 after a four-month courtship. Pound encouraged Eliot, who had been planning an academic career, to keep writing poetry and to submit "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Poetry magazine for publication. In addition to writing poetry, Eliot also took a position with Lloyd’s Bank in 1917, managing foreign accounts. Pound and Eliot frequently collaborated and critiqued each other’s work throughout the 1920s and 1930s and remained friends until Eliot’s death, despite divergent political and religious paths. The most famous of these collaborations, The Waste Land, has been documented in a published facsimile edition of the poem (1972) that reveals Pound’s numerous comments on Eliot’s manuscript. The Waste Land is revolutionary both in its form, free verse, and its subject matter, which links urbanization, technology, sexuality, and post-war alienation to dozens of classical allusions in seven languages. The poem is a pastiche of voices and fragments linked both thematically and tonally.

scholarly journals FORD MADOX FORD'S ESSAY ON POETRY AND T.S.ELIOT'S THE WAST LAND

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Rénaux
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
A Minor

The aim of this article is to bring together Ford Madox Ford's essay "Impressionism — Some Speculations", published as a preface to his own Collected Poems (1911) and considered to be "one of the most important critical documents to have been written on modern verse", and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), one of the most celebrated poems of the twentieth century. By comparing both texts, one becomes aware that Ford's esthetic principles become concretized in Eliot's poetry and in this way Ford, although considered a minor poet, has succeeded in his criticism to prognosticate some of the directions Eliot (and consequently a whole generation of poets influenced by him)would follow.

Brands on a wet, black bough: marketing the masterworks of modernism

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brown
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Marketing Principles ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose – In a world where commerce and culture are still somewhat estranged, the purpose of this paper is to show that high culture’s supreme exponents were commercially minded masters of marketing. Design/methodology/approach – Historically situated, the paper adopts a biographical approach to the making of modernism’s literary masterworks. It focuses on Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, who were responsible for the modernist classics, Ulysses and The Waste Land. Findings – The analysis identifies five fundamental marketing principles that appear paradoxical from a traditional, customer-centric standpoint, yet are in accord with latter-day, post-Kotlerite conceptualisations. The marketing of modernism did not rely on “modern” marketing. Practical implications – If, at the height of the anti-bourgeois modernist movement, the “great divide” between elite and popular culture was bridged by marketing, there is no reason why contemporary culture and commerce cannot collaborate, co-operate, co-exist, coalesce. Originality/value – The paper complements prior studies of “painterpreneurs”, by drawing attention to the marketing of literary masterworks.

scholarly journals Paris as ‘unreal city’: Modernist conceptions in Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andries Wessels
Keyword(s):  
Social Alienation ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

Michiel Heyns's sixth novel, Invisible Furies (2012) is deeply inscribed in the author's profound engagement in and knowledge of the grand modernist tradition. The article aims to illuminate and discuss this underrated novel in terms of some of its modernist attributes by relating the work conceptually to the works of great modernist writers, particularly T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, in order to demonstrate its impressive literary scope and density of meaning. While there are direct allusions to Eliot's poetry in the text, it is a certain sensibility and perspective that reminds the reader forcibly of Eliot's vision, particularly in The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925). Eliot's image of the "Unreal city", derived from Baudelaire's Les sept veillards, is particularly pertinent. A number of modernist concerns or themes are addressed in this context, in particular the ambiguous merits and value of the aesthetic, social alienation, the city and the concept of Forster's "eternal moment" (his equivalent to Joyce's "epiphany", Virginia Woolf's "moment of being" and Eliot's "moment in and out of time") as a possible means of salvation in the face of the meaninglessness of a spiritu- ally and emotionally arid, modern existence. 

Unreal City, Unreal Law

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis E. Wolcher
Keyword(s):  
Linear Time ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
City Street ◽  
The Law ◽  
The City ◽  
Possible Cause ◽  
Human Hands

AbstractThe law of the city degrades time to the dimension of space. The cityscape replaces a horizon made by woods, fields and streams with a jagged silhouette of rectilinear buildings, lots and thoroughfares. Geometrically speaking, a city street is a line that has been transected into segments called blocks. Blocks, in turn, are further segmented by the placement of individual buildings, which are enumerated as ‘addresses’ in the manner of sequenced moments on the universal timeline. The city, like the law, is produced by human hands according to the logic of the conceptual pairs which the idea of linear time makes possible: ‘cause and caused’, ‘ground and grounded’ and ‘means and end’. But there is something profoundly unreal about both of these institutional spaces: at the end of the day, the Unreal City mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land corresponds to a sort of Unreal Law. Both the city and the law manifest freedom’s impossible attempt to realise its own antithesis by substituting space for time, being for becoming, reason for chance, justification for responsibility and redemption for tragedy.

T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"; A Facsmile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.

1972 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 277
Author(s):  
Donal N. Koster ◽  
T. S. Eliot ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Valerie Eliot
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land

The Waste Land (1922)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Verse Forms ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal ◽  
First World

The Waste Land is an influential and experimental 435-line poem written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and first published in 1922. Structurally, it is a pastiche of different verse forms, both traditional and contemporary. The poem is richly allusive and polyvocal. It contains several different languages, as well as allusions to texts as diverse as the Upanishads, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. A pre-publication manuscript of the poem reveals that both Eliot’s first wife Vivienne and his friend Ezra Pound helped revise the poem into its final form before its initial publication in 1922. At its core, The Waste Land is about life in London following the catastrophe of the First World War. The fragmentation of the verse form in The Waste Land mirrors the fragmentation of life in war-torn London and the increasing disorientation of urban experience.

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