T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, “The Waste Land,” is 100 years old—but it has never stopped sounding new.
Imagine that you were a bookish reader, back in 1922. What did you make of this? Well, maybe you identified the words in French—meaning “And O these children’s voices, singing in the dome!”—as a line from “Parsifal,” a sonnet by Paul Verlaine. Pursuing a line of thought, you recalled Wagner’s opera of the same name, and the scene in which a sorceress washes the feet of the hero; and you wondered how that ceremonial purification was meant to hook up with the activities of Mrs.
Closing the book, you move on. The whisperings, however, together with the birdlike twitterings, reverberate in your mind’s ear. This noisy and peculiar work, like the snatch of an overheard song, or a nocturnal stab of shame at the thought of someone you once wronged, will not leave you alone. I happen to think, for what it’s worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of “The Waste Land,” are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn.
Trying to sort out who is uttering what, at any juncture, in “The Waste Land” is far from a fool’s errand, but it’s a tough task nonetheless. Augustine is not the only source whose words Eliot, ever the ventriloquist, throws into the mix. Others include Dante, Milton, Marvell, Spenser, Baudelaire, the explorer Ernest Shackleton, and a gang of English dramatists: John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Kyd, and the leader of the pack, Shakespeare, who never keeps quiet for long.
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