The Waste Land and Other Poems Read Online Free PDF Page B

feel, damp, of water. The poem leaves readers, ultimately, in many ways still dry and barren at the end, but it does succeed in bringing us just about as close to water as possible without getting there—like Moses leading his people to within sight of the promised land. In this vein, I read the poem, finally, as guardedly optimistic: The poet has traversed the desert, and the burden of the poem is absorbing and conveying all the suffering and horror that accompanies this metaphorical journey through the wastes of civilization and culture and postwar Europe and the incoherent, overcharged, frighteningly hostile modern world. But there is a release, an achievement, a transcendence perhaps, a strength of having survived, that glimmers just beyond the poem’s ending, or that might even manifest itself in the last three words, ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (‘The peace which passeth understanding’). At the end, we are left close to emergence.
     
    The present collection ends with Eliot’s masterpiece, and captures a vital aspect of Eliot’s poetic, but it would be an oversight to neglect the second major phase of Eliot’s life and career. In 1927 he converted to Anglo-Catholicism and published the devoutly meditative poem ‘Ash-Wednesday,’ which betokens a shift in his philosophy. The rest of his career was marked by a significant engagement in the consummately social medium of drama—a stark change from the solipsistic individualism of his poetry—and the poetic masterwork of this phase was Four Quartets, a poem of acceptance and forgiveness, moments of quiet peace and beauty, and (as it appeared during the throes of World War II) stoic endurance in the face of external devastation. He even wrote a collection of poems about cats (scored and produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber as a blockbuster musical, which, to the good fortune of the Eliot estate, has garnered probably more money in royalties than all the rest of his oeuvre). This more tolerant and accepting aesthetic of Eliot’s later life is a counterpoint to the hostile, cynical tropes of his earlier work. I do not believe that Eliot meant for this later work to negate or repudiate the earlier, but rather to sit alongside it: The two parts of Eliot’s career delineate two different approaches to the world, and it seems that Eliot believed both of them can be true. If one’s inclination as a reader is to seek some ultimately affirmative insight, then one may extrapolate beyond the bleak defeatism that pervades Eliot’s early poetry and see that, finally, he came to believe that Europe and culture and the human psyche will manage to endure.
     
    Randy Malamud is Professor of English and Associate Chair of the department at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and has taught modern literature at GSU since 1989. He is the author of three books about T. S. Eliot: The Language of Modernism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), a study of linguistic and stylistic coherence in the work of Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; T. S. Eliot’s Drama: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), a bibliographical reference work about Eliot’s dramatic career; and Where the Words Are Valid: T. S. Eliot’s Communities of Drama (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), a critical study of Eliot’s seven plays which argues that the social impetus of this work from his later career importantly complements the solipsistic strains of his earlier poetry. Dr. Malamud’s most recent work deals with cultural studies of human-animal relationships: On this topic, he has written Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: NYU Press, 1998) and Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (New York: Palgrave, 2003). His webpage, < http://www.gsu.edu/~wwweng/people/malamud.html >, lists contact information and links to articles he has written.

PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS 1917

FOR JEAN VERDENAL,