Reviews for Waste Land and Other Poems (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The average rating for Waste Land and Other Poems (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-19 00:00:00 Angela Donalson In 1918 the boys began their demobilization, and trickled back from the trenches. Did they get a hero's welcome? Not on your life! For bitter cynicism had descended upon Europe like a ghastly pall, like "the yellow fog" which as T.S. Eliot wrote, had submerged Britain in its lacrustine depths, and then, simply "fell asleep." For it was the beginning of our current long sleep of reason and decency. Nietzsche had forecasted the day correctly. It was the day of the Great Reversal - the quick and efficient Transvaluation of all Values - the advent of our Upside-Down Kingdom. Now it's the air that we breathe, bitter Postmodernism. There is no Hiding Place anymore. Progress has demolished and flatlined it all! It's like The Waste Land's Tom Eliot described the working of his own mind in Rhapsody on a Windy Evening: his mind "beat like a fatalistic Tom-tom (pun intended)." But don't we ALL mentally do that number on ourselves? Well, you might say, I may have OCD, but so what? At least the world is simple and understandable... but what jeering monsters has our proud cynicism NOW begotten! But that's what the jeering masses did as the boys returned: turned cheers into I-told-you-so jeers. Good riddance to the hoity-toity tea & crumpets elite! But hey, don't throw out the baby with the bath water, guys. Trouble is, the thoroughly educated, like Eliot and many of us, were numbered among this elite. All were being jeered. As well as his - and our - timeless intellectual treasures. So his - and our - most cherished values started to crumble when the boys returned, and the masses turned their backs on them. Jose Ortega y Gasset later described it in his epochal Revolt of the Masses, and their new ascendancy to the role of social arbiters. Arbiters indeed, Eliot said. The Tasteless Condemnation of all Taste - literary or otherwise! And Eliot, of course, saw it all. And he collapsed. He was admitted to a private sanatorium on the Continent, where he started to write this chaotically long masterpiece. Have you read it? Do you understand it? There are plenty of amazing books on it available! In a nutshell, it's just like U2 sings it: I was shaking from a storm in me Haunted by the spectres that we HAD to see Yeah, I wanted to be the melody Above the noise, above the hurt For it was in a nutshell - as Oswald Spengler said it - the Decline of the West. Where we are NOW. It was then, as many foresaw, the beginning of a Brave (Foolhardy? Precarious?) New World. And the beginning of the end for Eliot's upper-crust employer, Lloyd's of London - for they are the ones who superciliously scrawled 'Nervous Breakdown' on his Sick Leave form. But Eliot didn't care. For, as he says in the Waste Land about his breakdown: Phlebas the Phonecian, a fortnight dead, Forgot the (fruitless) profit and the loss... He had seen far too much to be ever-so-politely cowed now. And guess what? When he published this one poem he was catapulted to International Celebrity status. No more profit-and-loss balance sheets! He was world-famous. And a Rock Star to the kids who were starting to learn his stuff in school. And you know what? On the success of his books, he had secured his place in British Society - and was offered an excellent job as one of the founding editors of a fledgling new publishing house... The prestigious Faber Limited! For which company he became the principal Guiding Light, mentoring and publishing many of the younger British Writers who nowadays are ranked among the Great Masters of Modern Literature. The very ones who would warn US not to be too cock-sure of ourselves as social arbiters. Or has our cynicism forgotten that pivotal day, now that our own glory is threatened?

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-24 00:00:00 Noud Hekkens As a poet myself, I would thank T. S. Eliot for what he did by writing the most debated and influential poem of the previous and the current (this far) century. The Waste Land had shaped an entire generation of poets, giving them the free will to explore their thoughts without any fear of being judged by the meter... expression comes to Eliot naturally and The Waste Land is just an exceptional example of that. It's still relevant, contemporary and a must-read. For those who understand Poetry, The Waste Land will never be second on the lists that they make...