Read in Lent 2026. Of the five sections I liked the first (“I. The Burial of the Dead”) and last (“V. What the Thunder said”) the best. I had not read much Eliot before, but my recent experience of reading Fr. Aidan Nichols’ The Realm and a podcast on Eliot by a friend of mine convinced me that he was worth reflecting on, and his 1922 poem The Waste Land in particular.
I didn’t love the poem. I did think there were a number of interesting things in it. I understand that it is modernist poetry, and through its disjointedness it symbolizes modernity and its dissolution of the old order. But I would compare it to other modernist poetry such as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems seem to me to have more internal cohesion. Some parts of The Waste Land felt juvenile, desultory, a bit “look at me, I’m being modernist”.
Sometimes however I did feel he succeeded in bringing disparate subjects into relation with one another. It starts with Countess Marie Larisch, whom Eliot apparently did meet and speak to. We are to think of her role as go-between for her cousin, the Crown Prince Rudolf, and his mistress, Mary von Vetsera, and thus her implication in the Mayerling Incident.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
This seems to confront us all at once with the loss of childhood innocence, the ruin of the Hapsburg Monarchy, the impending trauma of the First World War, and the loss of society’s innocence. If we hold on to this thought later on when we meet the Arthurian Wounded or Fisher King (lines 51, 189–192, 423–425), whose health is connected to the health of the land, these associations are reinforced. The title of the poem itself makes me think of the Battle of Camlann, when the land was waste, and where Arthur fell.
Another collection of images that I found interesting were those of the infernal or Unreal City. We have references to Dante’s Divine Comedy throughout. We have London named as the Unreal City at the end of “The Burial of the Dead”, mixed with a quote from Dante standing at the Gates of Hell (Inferno, Canto III). We have St. Augustine’s arrival in Carthage (line 307, cf. Confessiones, Book III, Ch. 1), “where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears”. We have in “What the Thunder said” (lines 374–376) a short catalogue of these cities that are apparently all one:
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
And what’s more, the door to the city is locked behind us (lines 411–412, cf. Inferno, Canto XXXIII, 46):
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
I am reminded of J. R. R. Tolkien’s thoughts on escapism and modernity in On Fairy-Stories:
It is indeed an age of “improved means to deteriorated ends”. It is part of the essential malady of such days — producing the desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self-made misery — that we are acutely concious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil.
As Fr. Nichols points out, The Waste Land has a modernist exterior with a mythic interior, full of oblique references to traditional sources of wisdom: Arthurian legend, the Bible, St. Augustine, Virgil, Dante, the Buddha, etc. I understand there are certain figures that are meant to tie it all together, such as Tiresias and the Fisher King, but I struggled to see this.
This was a useful site I found for seeing Eliot’s own notes to the poem alongside a little bit of further commentary.