The Wasteland: A Biography of a Poem

[TranquillityBase]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/o...asterpiece

As someone who started writing poetry at age 16 after reading a biography of a poet (Dylan Thomas), and who has always found reading about poets' lives rewarding, I'm really looking forward to this book, to be published in December in the U.S.

I came to appreciate Eliot fairly late in life (in my 40s), but he is now someone I re-read regularly.

Just an FYI about the book.

[The Karate Kid Part 2]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/o...asterpiece

As someone who started writing poetry at age 16 after reading a biography of a poet (Dylan Thomas), and who has always found reading about poets' lives rewarding, I'm really looking forward to this book, to be published in December in the U.S.

I came to appreciate Eliot fairly late in life (in my 40s), but he is now someone I re-read regularly.

Just an FYI about the book.

Thanks for the link. 
It's funny, I started reading poetry around the same age (though a bit younger. Maybe 13 or 14) and the first 3 books I bought were Selected Poems of William Blake, Under Milk Wood (not a poetry book, of course), and a collection of Dylan Thomas poetry. I've ripped off Altarwise by Owl-light in my writing more than I'd care to admit.

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 I've ripped off Altarwise by Owl-light in my writing more than I'd care to admit.

Bad poets borrow, good poet steal.  I think Eliot said that.

[rowens]

Good/Great.

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Good poets borrow. As language is that way.

Great poets steal.

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V. P. say originality is blase.

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“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

T.S.E., The Sacred Wood

[rowens]

You got this version.

There's a movie where the quote Good poets borrow, Great poets steal, is written on the chalkboard.

It's the best of the versions of the quote.

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Then Roethke said about imitate your heroes, and fail, and that failure will be your originality

The Waste Land quotes poems in a way that is The Waste Land.

That's why all the quiltwork works.

Leopardi is full of uncredited direct quotes too.

Poets don't use quotation marks because they expect their readers to know the sources offhand.

People who see plagiarism are immature readers.

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That's called Modernism.

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Hart Crane called it a Bridge.

Bridge over Waste Land.

The Danes call it quality.

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My explanation about why Waste Land is two words got deleted got deleted for the same reason that some people are more than one people one people.

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Someone sent me a column from the Washington Post about how this is the 100th anniverary of the publication of The Waste Land (and how, in their opinion, it's still relevant).  Thus, the timing of the publication of this book.  I'm still looking forward to reading it, but I also feel tricked.  It seems like so much on the Internet (this site being a notable exception) is a trick to get you to buy something. 

But sometimes tricks backfire.  Ask Wile E. Coyote.

[rowens]

I like going in used bookstores and finding books there that didn't come up on Amazon. Sometimes I look for books on this machine on subjects and go through and through and find nothing I want. Then I find some book on the shelf with its glaring title. Something obviously on the subject.

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I'm reading this now.  If you are a fan of the Eliot/Pound era, you would find it fascinating in most ways.  It does become tedious at times, since the author is micro-focused on the years 1919-1921.  It's reminiscent of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era.

I've not yet gotten to the point where Eliot actually begins to write The Wasteland, but I think it's coming soon.  So far (up to page 190 out of 388) the author has been tracing Eliot's development since Prufrock. Possibly more than you want to know about his personal life, though it's all selected for having an impact on the poem, I expect.

I wish I was a note-taker, because there've been many memorable quotes, mostly by the notorious EP.

[busker]

21 quid!!! But if it’s 388 pages on normal font (and not large sized, for the Brexit and Trump voting generation), then it’s a worthwhile purchase
The Waste Land is everyone’s favourite English language poem, so doubly worth it.

[TranquillityBase]

21 quid!!! But if it’s 388 pages on normal font (and not large sized, for the Brexit and Trump voting generation), then it’s a worthwhile purchase
The Waste Land is everyone’s favourite English language poem, so doubly worth it.

For whatever it's worth, it's a very nicely printed book.  It's even got a place mark ribbon sewn in 

And my copy was printed in the UK, so I've contributed a wee bit to the ailing British economy.

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The manuscript is about to go to EP for his editing pleasure.  (p. 302). If you haven't ever seen the facsimile of the draft with Pound's editing (been around since 1971 and ought to be accessible through a library), it's worth just looking at it to get the feel of it.

As you can see, I'm creeping through this at a snail's pace; not the book's fault, although it is demanding.

I want to write a poem about Eliot's typwriters.  He began composing on a typewriter just about the time he began The Wasteland.  His first typewriter, an already worn out Corona, looking maybe like this

https://typewriterdatabase.com/1912-coro...typewriter

This is a 1902, it probably wasn't that old.....anyway you get the picture.  He wrote most of his draft on it, but was gifted by a brother with his more or less new Corona. 

https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/no...set/451574 

But enough about typewriters; advice to anyone else who reads this book:

Too late for me, but I would recommend reading at least Prufrock, Gerontion, and of course The Wasteland, at least giving them a skim, before taking up the book.

[rowens]

All of this information was in the multiple books that used to be in the Danville Public Library in multiple books, that were old and beautiful and usually yellow, red, blue, orange, black or green, hardcover, published between the 1940s and 1980s. Before they got rid of those books.

They, the They that always does things; things, they never do Things, but rarely, usually, humanly, things.

Which makes me wonder about these new chaps, and the horses they rode in on.

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Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliots wife (at the time[Take into consideration the way I've used parentheses in my last few posts]), Tradition, Culturally, and Poetically specific.

The Waste Land.

Read: Hart Crane-The Bridge.

Wallace Stevens-Harmonium.

William Carlos Williams, before: Paterson.

Don't read Pound's Cantos, but keep in mind that you haven't read them/that.

Lautreamont. Nerval. Dante. Whitman. Homer. Dante. Not Shakespeare [ ], that space was an english inch; Donne, the Gita, and no other Indian religious text, pick which[gita];
EVERYTHING YOU AND YOUR MATES/PALS have written
Baudelaire,


Both T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs ware from MO, the collage, the Modernism, the acid trip of morphine:

Consider the Radiance oen less ricky/sick participants in this thing, Life



The fluid of the capacities



How!
by Allen Ginsberg is not as good a poem as The Waste Lane by T. E. Dliet.;,... . . . This is the major Poetry Workshop Misunderstandninjbdj not Modern but current

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Not Modern but currently

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Crrent Lterature

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T. S. Eliot and his compratriots werwe writing within a balance of Modern/at that time CURRENT expression in poetry
,


.

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He knew he was working within, by his own sensitivity and therefore definition: Decadence.

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The Waste Land has that sense of desperation. Like a lazy period, HE was a CHRISTIAN.

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Profound desperation, the Picasso, Einstein, WW1 version of Romanticism.


I'm going to stop now, that I'm Hot.


I've been banned from websites for lesS.