The Manuscript of "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot

A favorite place of mine to visit in London is Waterstone’s Bookstore in Piccadilly. reputedly the largest book shop in Europe. The store has eight stories but only five floors. Because the building includes a lower ground floor (we Americans would say basement), a ground floor (our first floor), a mezzanine level followed by four official floors and the official fifth floor being the restaurant. 

The restaurant looks down to Jermyn Street and south toward Trafalgar Square. From a window table, you can see some of the famous St. James-area shops below, and a straight view from the window depicts rooftops and spires of some of the best-known buildings in Westminster. Piccadilly Circus is about a block east, and Hatchards Bookstore and Fortnum & Mason a block west. The Royal Academy of Arts is across Piccadilly, and the Ritz Hotel is about a two-minute walk away. St. James Palace, which fronts the complex that includes the royal residence of Charles III at Clarence House, is “down the block and around the corner,” give or take a couple of blocks.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Leaving the Island (Inishbofin) – poem by David Whyte.

 

When Enemies Forgive Each Other – Spencer Klavan at the Free Press on The Iliad.

 

Three Acorns from Emily’s Yard – poem by Andrea Potos at Every Day Poems.

 

“Life and Art,” poem by Aldous Huxley – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Using T.S. Eliot to Explain PTSD

East Coker is a village in Somersetshire. In 1667, Andrew Eliot emigrated from the village to the New World, and specifically the American colonies. A little more than two centuries later, one of Andrew’s direct descendants was born in St. Louis, and would grow up to write poetry. He would name one of his poems “East Coker,” for the village of his ancestors. The poem was one of four “quartets,” originally published individually as pamphlets in England during World War II. The four would eventually be published together in America under the title of Four Quartets.

The poet, of course, is T.S. Eliot, who is more associated with what we describe as “modernism” than virtually any other poet. (Other modernist poets include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens.) Modernism has much to do with the changes that racked Western society and culture following the Industrial Revolution, the population shift from rural to urban areas, the scientific revolution, and World War I. Context had changed; culture had changed. Society was disjointed, a kind of “waste land,” to use Eliot’s phrase, collectively suffering what we call today “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” People had become “hollow men.”

It is these modernist images from Eliot that we find embedded in East of Coker, a novella-length work by U.K. writer Andy Owen.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: T.S. Eliot in the 1920s, when he wrote The Waste Land.

Robert Crawford on the Young Eliot

Before he was the winner for the Nobel Prize for Literature, before he was recognized for some of the most innovative and remarkable poetry of the 20^th century, before “The Hollow Men” became one of the most recognizable poems in modern times, he was Tom Eliot, young Tom Eliot.

ThomasStearnes Eliot was the youngest of six children, born in 1888 when his parents were 45 and his siblings considerably older. His was an upper class family in St. Louis, where his father was a vice president of a major brick manufacturer and his grandfather the founder of Washington University in St. Louis. His Unitarian family came from New England, and he was related to John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Henry Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

We’re more familiar with the latter half of Eliot’s career, from the time he was established as a poet of international renown, his Nobel Prize, and the poetry that in many ways helped to define Modernism in literary history. But before he was the famous poet, he was the boy, the young man at Harvard, and the expatriate in England.

In Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The WasteLand, Robert Crawford explores the early Eliot in depth, covering the period from his birth to the Publication of “The Waste Land” in 1922.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Vivien and Tom Eliot at home in London about 1921.