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On its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was not so well received: “so much waste paper,” opined The Guardian. But of course since then it has ascended into the canon. Four writers and scholars– Beci Carver, Jahan Ramazani, Robert Crawford, and David Barnes— explain why now “the poem is such a key landmark that all modern poets know it, whether they swerve around it, crash into it, or attempt to assimilate it.”

Though I do understand why people often see—and hear—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as inventing modern poetry in English, I think The Waste Land does so more comprehensively. It’s as if this poem can give anything—a cry, a list of place-names, a snatch of conversation, a Sanskrit word, a nursery rhyme, an echo—an almost infinite and carrying resonance that brings with it unforgettable intensity. Ezra Pound who, prior to editing The Waste Land,  had just been editing an English translation of an avant-garde collage-style French poem by Jean Cocteau, helped give the poem its intensity; but the words were Eliot’s.

… Pound’s editing was highly ethical in that he did not add or substitute words of his own; he just honed what Eliot had written. Eliot had learned from Pound’s bricolage style, but where Pound went on to go on and on and on, Eliot (with Pound’s editorial help) learned as a young poet just when to stop. That’s a great gift. So the poem exemplifies at once the way in which poetry can incorporate all kinds of diverse materials; yet it also constitutes a supreme example of poetic intensity. It’s quite a combination—and one from which innumerable poets (from Auden to Xu Zhimo and from MacDiarmid to Okigbo and beyond) have learned…

Robert Crawford

The appreciation in full at “The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ at 100,” in @lithub.

* T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

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As we muse on modernism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” premiered on CBS. The special, based on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip and produced/animated by Bill Melendez, pre-empted My Three Sons and tied Bonanza as the top-rated program of the week. It has aired every year since, on network television until 2020, when Apple TV won the exclusive rights to the show.

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