Ahead of his upcoming Roundtable seminar on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, running in celebration of the great poem’s 100th anniversary — and Ralph Fiennes’ sold out staged reading — we talked to celebrated poet and critic Matthew Hollis about his new book The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, the truth about “difficult” poetry, why Eliot’s voice sounds as fresh as it’s ever been, and much more.
You call your book on The Waste Land “a biography of a poem.” What do you mean by that?
I think that quite a lot of poets feel not exactly that the poem is in possession of them, but that the poem is the result of a cooperation between them, a possessive force, and a work of art. In the case of The Waste Land, I think of the poem as a little bit like a stage in which characters enter and exit: T.S. Eliot of course, Ezra Pound, Vivien Eliot, but also the war, family, the Spanish flu pandemic, and a faltering economy. All of these forces, and especially the electrification of the world, arrive at one moment in history and play out in the imagination of not only Eliot but Ezra Pound. And through their cooperation and mutual brilliance, they meld something that becomes this poem. It’s a way of thinking of poetry as something that is out there having an effect and moving through life in the way that human beings do.
The Waste Land has long had a reputation as a “difficult” poem — a kind of gauntlet thrown down for readers to pick up. Eliot himself may have encouraged this in his own critical writing about poetry. And yet it’s one of the most widely read, widely discussed, widely beloved poems of the last century, or any century. How do you account for this? Do you think its reputation for difficulty is earned?
It’s a very good question. Eliot thought that poetry ought to be difficult because life itself was difficult. Here was a world in which almost ten million combatants had been killed in the war, and six million civilians, and the influenza that would follow in four waves across the world from 1918 onwards would kill millions of people as well. Entire villages were wiped out, populations devastated. It was difficult to comprehend. At the same time, one of the things that’s so fascinating about The Waste Land is that Eliot was seemingly the only poet who was drawing on forms of popular culture at the time. He was fascinated by the development of cinema, by cabaret, by comedy. One of the ways we can approach The Waste Land is like a music hall performance — in which there are a series of acts that enter and exit the stage — the comedian, the juggler, the musician, the romantic scene, the song, the dance. For a poem that perhaps more than most is described as “difficult,” it is a fascinating riddle that it is informed so much by Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, and other forms of popular music.
Ezra Pound’s role in editing and transforming Eliot’s poem has been the stuff of legend for decades. The role of Vivien, Eliot’s wife at the time, tends to get less attention. How did she help shape The Waste Land?
In two ways. She was a reader of the poem, which we know because we have her pencil marks on the manuscript. At one point in “A Game of Chess” she writes “Wonderful” in the margins; perhaps tellingly, in another scene possibly describing the difficulties of a marital chamber, she writes, “Don’t see what you had in mind here.” The famous pub scene is deeply informed by Vivien’s ear. And the extraordinary line, “What you get married for if you don’t want to have children” is Vivien’s own. In one sense you can see her working with Eliot to improve the tonality of the poem — she does that very well. But on a deeper level she’s a psychic presence in the poem. It was a difficult relationship. There are so many images in the poem of Eliot responding to her — but also the psychic maelstrom of their marriage, which created the force of the poem. Eliot says at one point, “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”
What do you hope the participants in your seminar will take with them when it’s over?
I would be thrilled if they allowed the poem to inhabit them — not only for the time of the seminar, but the time the follows. I think it’s a poem that can rightly take possession of us. It can help us in questions about mental health. It is in search of a spiritual response to an alienated moment in our history. And I think it deals with grief in an elegiac way. I think the themes that it addresses are ones that are immediate to us today. And beyond all that, I hope that it encourages them to think inventively and ambitiously in their own writing and reading. It’s fascinating that here is a poem that many people at the time thought really shouldn’t have been written. It was dealing in subject matters that some people thought art should not engage. But I think there have been few poems that have so successfully challenged what we write about and how we write about it, while at the same time understanding our connections to our history. It’s a great poem to learn from and live through.
Roundtable’s Reading The Waste Land with Matthew Hollis begins Thu, Dec 15.