Jed Esty, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English It's about trauma and collapse, both global and personal. And if Eliot didn’t invent this collage or assemblage technique, he certainly crystallized it in 1922. That’s understandable to today's students because everything comes to us in a jumble of excerpts, sampled and ripped out of context, then reassembled into new works. “The Waste Land” is prescient in the way it samples culture. Eliot was one of the great poets for expressing in a single work the crack-up of the cultural and informational world he occupied. Every age has its own version of information overload. Eliot was signaling that information is overloading the poem-that it can't be organized or contained. When we think of a great monument, we think of it as containing and organizing information. These footnotes-which he famously published along with the text, a strikingly avant-garde thing to do in 1922-signal that the cultural center he’s trying to usher readers into is itself already entropic, losing its center. It's woven out of many sources, and there's an elaborate irony to the way he uses footnotes to explain his references. The great irony of this poem's life is that it's become a monument of Western civilization or modern poetry, but it was intended by Eliot as an anti-monument in a way. It’s an anti-monument that’s become a monument.

Here, Esty explains his seven things to know about “The Waste Land” today. His most recent book is The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits. He’s been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. We asked Jed Esty, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English, what we should know about “The Waste Land” and its place in the culture after a century.Įsty specializes in 20th-century British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures, and also explores modernism, critical theory, and the history and theory of the novel. The poem was considered radical when it was published in the fall of 1922, following the first World War and a global pandemic, and was recently called “the most important poem of the 20th century” by Literary Hub.

The waste land text