T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land

"Eliot departed from the formulaic and moralizing poetry of the nineteenth century"

WHAT

"i have never seen awounderful poetry of aman like the waste land i send my sweet words to my lecturer dr faten helmy"

HUH

"Worse than: Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Better than: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane"

WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT

"It's probably due to the fact that I am a bit thick"

OH. I GUESS THAT MAKES SENSE

"None of it makes sense!"


"I've always thought it to be the perfect example of an indecipherable work of art that cultured people are too embarrassed to admit they don't understand; because they don't want to seem unsophisticated, they label it genius, and everyone else goes along with it."


"This Pisses Me Off and Makes Me Feel Like a Moron ... Yes, it's all the pieces of the 'shattered' classical world, thrown together in a different and hideous mixture to reflect the modernists' belief that the world as they knew it, and all previous literary forms, weren't up to the task of reflecting their contemporary world"


"Who wants to read 20 pages of foot notes?"


"Much of the book, including entire poems, is not in English and has no translation. And much of what is in English seems to require cultural knowledge that someone in the 21st century simply does not have ... I can't really say I've read it since it begins with six lines in French, and I just don't care enough to look up a translation. I didn't have the patience to decode things when they got dense - I gave up on 'The Wasteland' after two pages - because the language issue made the task seem futile."


"Maybe I shouldn't have bothered since I already think poetry is a giant waste of time, but I found this to be nothing but a bunch of disjointed crap all thrown together in a mish-mash of wandering pointlessness. If the poet needs a twenty page breakdown of the random, obscure references to follow the poem, then maybe it sucks. I'm sure if anyone who loves poetry actually reads this review, they'll just think I'm too stupid to understand the nuances of his PROSE. They may be right, but then again, maybe I'm just smart enough to not give a shit.

P.S. I can bench press a Buick."


"Eliot has taken poetry twenty years into the past with this poem. While others are experimenting with their poetics, Eliot falls back on an Old World school of writing that would be better obsolete."

OH NO, NOW WE'LL NEVER REACH THE GOAL TOWARDS WHICH ALL POETRY IS MOVING AS A UNIFORM BODY


"Very difficult to approach with a clear setup or even as a fair reader. One, I don't generally read poetry, and I enjoy it even less. Two, Eliot's work is really too famous to engage with"


"It is my understanding that Eliot has much more poetry than is contained in this short volume. I am glad"