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A friend said that a perceptible dramatic or play-like character existed in the poem. Eliot liked that observation very much. McLuhan has commented on how Pound used the 5 act structure of Elizabethan drama to ring the pieces together. P. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 10:06 PM Subject: Re: The Design of The Waste Land -- a study by Burton Blistein > If there is a "design" (overall structure or form) in TWL it was either > put there by Ezra Pound, not composed by Eliot or imposed _after_ the > fact by Eliot as he wrote the notes. If you want to assign a "design" to > Eliot himself, you have to find it in the original typescrpt as we see > it in the fasimile edition. Probably Eliot himself was not free of the > 19th-c superstition that a poem must have an "organic" form, and this > shows up both in his desire to preface Gerontion to the poem and in the > notes he wrote, particularly the note on the poem being what Tiresias > saw! That Eliot did in fact share this critical error is shown by his > silly remark that Hamlet was an artistic failure! > > There is much to be said for the argument in an essay in Critical > Inquirry some decades ago entitled, "Coherent Readers; Incoherennt > Texts." And this seems to apply quite felicitously to TWL. The > coherence which many critics find in the poem is there all right -- > because they put it ther! > > This is NOT the same as saying a poem can mean anything a reader wants > it to mean. There still remains a need for responsible reading (if the > critic wants anyone to pay attention to him/her anyhow). If some reader > were to 'find' in TWL a deliberate point-by-point refutation of Hobbes's > _Leviathan_ or of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason we (or at leas I) > wouldn't argue with the reading, I would merely ignore it and anything > else which that particular critic wrote. (As I do simply ignore the > readings of several posters on this list.) But though not anyy old > reading some reader wants will do, the range of possible conflicting but > legitimate readings is, I think, fairly wide, and rather wider in the > case of The Waste Land. And I would argue that withiin that range is one > that Eliot himself specifically rejected with a sneer: that it expressed > the disillusion of a generation! When WW 1 began, Henry James commented > something like, So this is what it all meant, by which I presume he > referred to the whole self-satisfaction of the end of the 19th-c that > "civilization" had been achieved, that Progress was a metaphysical > reality, and that (as expressed in Kipling's "White Man's Burden") that > achieved civilization had only to be imposed on the rest of the world > that still lay in outer darkness. > > I think we are in Rat's Alley: The war to end war has instead been a war > that itself never ended, and "we" the postwar generation are still, as > we walk through the streets of London, in the trenches ourselves. (That > third who walks always beside 'you' might welll be the unburied dead of > the endless war.) One is reminded of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (That > closed car at four: where is it going anyhow?) And had Eliot persuaded > Pound to allow him to preface Gerontion to TWL, the corridors of > Versailles (the cunning passages) could be the twisted streets of London > and both could be the intricate maze of the trenches of that war that > will not end, the dead flowing over London Bridge in an endless stream > (I had not known death had undone so many: it is difficult to believe > the death toll of WW1). And so forth, the poem is an echo chamber. One > would not want many poems with that sort of polysemy. I am glad we have > one like this though. > > Carrol