Eliot knew he couldn’t write full time, it was too difficult and took too much from him. The plan fizzled out, Eliot kept his job, which was a better plan in the long run. Pound came up with a plan to solicit Eliot’s friends asking them to pay into a subscription program (like a Go Fund Me campaign) that would support Eliot enough so he could quit his job at the bank and write full time.Įliot was embarrassed by the idea and wanted no part of it. He wrote during his vacations (spa visits for his nerves) and after business hours.īut Ezra Pound had more romantic aspirations for his artist friend. It was a depressing job, but steady work. To support himself and his languishing wife, Eliot took a job with Lloyds Bank coordinating WWI reparation demands. Eliot himself was not a robust man and suffered from nerves, so a sick partner was unhelpful, to say the least. His first wife, Vivian, was ill and querulous. He described The Waste Land as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life… just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” The Go Fund Me CampaignĮliot had married impulsively and quickly regretted it. It brings those immediate post-war years into high relief, using snippets, foreign phrases, conversations, and a lot of angst.Įliot’s friend Ezra Pound wrote that, “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900.”īut creating an icon for post-war life was not really Eliot’s intent. The Waste Land captures the fallout from the Great War. These artists were responding to the new world, the modern world. Both The Waste Land and Ulysses were published in 1922. While Eliot was observing commuter traffic over London Bridge, James Joyce was walking Leopold Bloom through Dublin framing an everyday man through the tropes of the Odyssey. He was not alone of course, no artist is. He captured the detritus of modern life: the calls, the conversations, magazines and newspapers, collaging them all into a poem. He was influenced by the French symbolists, as well as American cultural influences. Why It Speaks to UsĮliot was of the time. I cheerfully waded through the weeds (and the footnotes and the criticisms) of TS Eliot’s most famous work, specifically trying to understand a little more about the process of becoming a famous poem and why a poet like Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. This year I celebrated the (roughly) 100 year anniversary of TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.

Let’s welcome back monthly columnist Catharine Bramkamp as she shares with us “Notes on a Difficult Poem: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Enjoy!

The waste land by ts eliot