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“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Publication
Publication
The Waste Land was published in 1922 in The Criterion, Eliot's own journal, then in The Dial. The first English version of the Waste Land was published in America by Boni and Liverlight in 1922, and then in 1923 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf‘s Hogarth Press., with the addition of the notes.
T.S. Eliot dedicated the poem to Ezra Pound, calling him 'il miglior fabbro' (the better craftsman). Pound’s editorial intervention reduced the original manuscript by nearly half, removing long narrative passages and going for a more concise tone. Pound also changed the title, which originally was "He Do the Police in Different Voice".
Historical context
Historical context
Published in 1922, The Waste Land depicts a society (or what remains of it) in shambles after World War I. The city that Eliot describes is London, and it's described as a post-apocalyctic disaster in which the only humans remaining are fragile, incapable of communicating and at war with eachother. The role of the Industrial Revolution is also central: the mechanization and technological advancements are deeply linked to the degradation of the human condition.
Structure
Structure
The poem is made of 430-440 lines and five sections, each one of them connected to the other thanks to recurring themes.
"In the case of The Waste Land I feel very strongly against publication of any parts separately. The poem is intended to be a whole and if I allowed parts of it to be printed separately, it might not only spread the impression that it is merely a collection of unrelated parts, but might also appear to give sanction from myself of this impression. I do not want people to read the poem at all unless they read the whole thing, and it is quite impossible for any part of the poem to give a fair conception of the whole."
(T.S. Eliot to Miss J. Colcord, 28 January 1924)
Themes
Themes
Drought and water, the critique of urban life, love and lust, mechanization of men, time, death and rebirth, fragility, fragmentation of the human experience, Christ, history and myth, isolation, desolation, seasons, perversions, war.
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