The day after we arrived in Paris we went to hear our friend Penelope deliver a lecture on T. S. Eliot’s “the Wasteland”. It was part of a conference on Eliot’s poetry held at the Sorbonne and Penelope was considered to have made a very impressive contribution, not just by her fans, but by the many highly regarded academics who were there. She spoke of Eliot’s attempts in the poem to reconcile the conflict between memory and desire through the Eastern (eg, Budhist) approach of transcending the self centred individualistic approach to life, which causes such conflict, and moving stage by stage to the point where one has become part of the hole – sorry – whole.
This raised many interesting questions. One questioner asked if in fact the poem was an account of failed therapy, because all the transcending he attempted didn’t solve Eliot’s problems. It was also apparent that one had little or no hope of following the poet’s line of thought unless one was au fait with the sources of all the references and allusions he made (a friend of mine once described the Waste Land as a giant cryptic crossword). And how acceptable was the notion of losing the awareness of one’s individuality - in fact ceasing to exist as a person - in order to merge with the highest level of existence?
So, given all this, is it worth grappling with this difficult poem in the first place? Many would say it is, just because it gets you thinking about so many issues.
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