The Waste Land

by T. S. Eliot, Mint Editions (Contribution by)

Overview

The Waste Land (1922) is a poem by T.S. Eliot. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Eliot took a leave of absence from his job at a London bank to stay with his wife Vivienne at the coastal town of Margate. He worked on the poem during these months before showing an early draft to Ezra Pound, who helped edit the poem toward publication. The Waste Land, dedicated to Pound, includes hundreds of quotations of and allusions to such figures as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Saint Augustine, Chaucer, Baudelaire, and Whitman, to name only a few.

Divided into five sections—“The Burial of the Dead;” “A Game of Chess;” “The Fire Sermon;” “Death by Water;” and “What the Thunder Said”—The Waste Land is a complex poem that translates Eliot’s fragile emotional state and increasing dissatisfaction with married life into an apocalyptic vision of postwar England. The poem begins with a meditation on despair before moving to a polyphonic narration by figures on the theme. The third section focuses on death and denial through the lens of eastern and western religions, using Saint Augustine as a prominent figure. Eliot then moves from a brief lyric poem to an apocalyptic conclusion, declaring: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience.” Both personal and universal, global in scope and intensely insular, The Waste Land changed the course of literary history, inspiring countless poets and establishing Eliot’s reputation as one of the foremost artists of his generation.

This edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781513279671
Publisher:	Mint Editions
Publication date:	02/16/2021
Series:	Mint Editions (Poetry and Verse)
Pages:	22
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a British poet of American descent. Born in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent family from Boston, Eliot was raised in a religious and intellectual household. Childhood ailments left Eliot isolated for much of his youth, encouraging his interest in literature. At the age of ten, he entered a preparatory school where he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. During this time, he also began writing poetry. From 1906 to 1909, he studied at Harvard University, earning a Master of Arts in English literature and introducing himself to the poetry of the French Symbolists. Over the next several years, he studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit at the Harvard Graduate School before attending Oxford on a scholarship to Merton College. Tiring of academic life, however, he abandoned his studies and moved to London, where he met the poet Ezra Pound. With Pound’s encouragement and editing, Eliot published such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and “The Waste Land” (1922), works that earned him a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s leading poets and a major figure in literary Modernism. Living in England with his wife Vivienne—from whom he would separate in 1932—Eliot worked as a prominent publisher for Faber and Faber, working with such poets as W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes. He converted to Anglicanism in 1927, an event that inspired his poem “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) and led to the composition of his masterpiece Four Quartets (1943). Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

Table of Contents

Introduction     7
Biographical Sketch     14
The Story Behind the Story     19
List of Characters     22
Summary and Analysis     26
Critical Views     53
Eleanor Cook on Maps of The Waste Land     53
Louis Menand on Nineteenth Century Style     57
Sandra M. Gilbert on Eliot's Mourning of a Friend     68
Michael Levenson on Eliot's Views of Postwar London     74
Juan A. Suarez on the Meaning of the Gramophone     85
Shawn R. Tucker on Anxiety in The Waste Land     89
Thomas Dilworth on Sex Between the Typist and the Young Man     94
Camelia Elias and Bent Soerensen on the Influence of Ovid     97
Works by T.S. Eliot     101
Annotated Bibliography     103
Contributors     105
Acknowledgments     108
Index     110

What People are Saying About This

Anthony Burgess

The Waste Land remains the best manifesto of modernism in poetry — a triumph of concision, eloquence, colloquialism, symbolism, cinematic cutting, collage of existing literature as well as popular song, all in the service of a kind of purgatorial philosophy, civilization was decaying, man was growing impotent, salvation lay in the injunctions of a Sanskrit Upanishad: "Give, sympathize, control." (Anthony Burgess, from One Man's Chorus)

Editorial Reviews

Written when Eliot was working as a bank clerk and heavily edited by his friend Ezra Pound, 1922's The Waste Land could probably take the prize as the most important English-language poem of the 20th century. This 75th-anniversary edition includes the full text plus notes and an afterword by scholar/editor Christopher Ricks.

Library Journal

Prints the first American edition (Boni & Liveright) of Eliot's most important work, accompanied by the editor's detailed annotations. Eliot's own notoriously inscrutable notes, placed at the end, are also annotated. The abundant explanatory material includes background on the poem's sources, composition, and publication history as well as 25 critical reviews and essays. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews