Eliot in Waste Land

The following is an excerpt from a 1923 magazine or newspaper:

Everyone interested in poetry is talking about The Waste Land, T S Eliot’s long poem published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, after first being printed last year in Mr Eliot’s new magazine, The Criterion.

Many cannot recognize it as poetry. It is a collage of quotations and echoes other writers, Shakespeare, Dante, St. Augustine and the Buddha among them, as well as sexual episodes, jazz-like rhythms, and Cockney vulgarities in a public house at closing time. It calls up a desolate picture of spiritual emptiness and aridity. It has outraged lovers of “Georgian” poetry as much as Joyce and Stravinsky have outraged traditionalists. Sir John Squire calls it “incomprehensible” and F L Lucas damned it as “one of the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry….

Eliot, an American with an English wife, works in a London bank (Lloyds Foreign and Colonial). He dedicates the poem to his fellow-American poet, Ezra Pound, who severely cut it before publication. Despite its difficulty it has become a cult among undergraduates.