Radically T.S. Eliot: Jed Rasula’s What the Thunder Said: How The Wasteland Made Poetry Modern

Radically T.S. Eliot: Jed Rasula’s What the Thunder Said: How The Wasteland Made Poetry Modern
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022; 334 pp., $39.95

T.S. Eliot sits awkwardly and uneasily in the age of “canceling.” Later in life a devout Anglican and a “traditional” conservative, Eliot was one of the twentieth century’s most sincere apologists for Western civilization and Christianity. At the same time, Eliot (especially but not exclusively in his youth) was among a cadre of “radical” High Modernist figures that helped usher in the waves of avant-garde art that radically changed Western culture in between the two World Wars. It is this Eliot who is the subject of University of Georgia English professor Jed Rasula’s What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern.

As Rasula notes, in the twentieth century, The Waste Land was a frequently anthologized and often-read work of English literature. As a result, the work seems tamed and commonplace or, even worse, boringly conservative to twenty-first century readers. Hoping to rekindle the radicalism of the poem, Rasula argues that The Waste Land is a work that made “the ancient art of poetry” modern. Rasula notes that The Waste Land is part of a wide wave of avant-garde art that included abstractionism, atonal music, and a host of other transgressions of tradition, such as Marcel Duchamp’s notorious 1917 Fountain (a urinal signed “R. Mutt”). The Waste Land is, like Sergei Eisenstein’s Potemkin, Igor Stavinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, thus, on one level, according to Rasula, an artistic fulfillment of Arthur Rimbaud’s 1871 clarion call to become “modern.”

Rasula’s Eliot is a deeply modern, early-twentieth-century man who danced the foxtrot and grizzly bear and who (in addition to his consumption of canonical literary works) read Mutt and Jeff as well as Krazy Kat comics. Eliot’s Waste Land is thus a work that, although drawing from canonical works and being itself a now a canonical work, a poem deeply conversant with the emerging mass culture of the twentieth century. Like many of his generation, Eliot believed that early twentieth-century English literature had a reached a stale low point.

In his detailed and erudite work, Rasula depicts The Waste Land as being a key example of what Richard Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk or “total artwork.” According to Rasula, the Waste Land is further a poem, like the opera of Wagner, which draws from the past to project an imaginative future. Myth for both Eliot and Wagner was a source and renewal and vitality for the West, which enabled European civilization to transcend modernity. While Wagner is (rightly or wrongly) pilloried in the twenty-first century as a proto-Nazi or at least a proto-fascist artist, the German composer’s work was considered radical and even “degenerate” by some conservatives in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Wagner’s work is referenced throughout Eliot’s Waste Land. Rasula describes Wagnerism as being a “mania” in which the participant in the art finds him or herself within Wagner. As Rasula notes, even Friedrich Nietzsche saw Wagnerism as being a disease with which Nietzsche himself was infected. If one was an artist like Eliot, then he or she birthed a new work of art both similar and dissimilar to the self he saw in Wagner. Wagner influenced the French symbolists, who in turn influenced Eliot, but Wagner himself was a direct influence upon Eliot’s Waste Land.

As Rasula argues, Richard Wagner was considered a “messiah of a new age” in his own time and was compared to both Napoleon and (blasphemously) to Christ himself. As Eliot himself later would, Wagner was adored by both radicals and reactionaries as well as by both Christians and pagans. Wagnerism itself is both Christian and pagan as well as chaste and lewd; it is intellectual and emotional. It is often what the listener makes of it, and thus is very modern. Moreover, while opera in the twenty-first century is considered haute culture, many (but not all) of Wagner’s acolytes were unwashed bohemian ragamuffins—a similar phenomenon would later occur among Eliot’s followers. However, Wagner (like Eliot) could draw the following royalty and high society and could, with works such as Parsifal, inspire (aestheticized) Christian devotion.

Wagner inspired what are considered the first two major works of modern poetry: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) and Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857). As Rasula notes, Baudelaire was swept away by Wagner’s Tannhäuser in January of 1861, penning an essay for the Revue européene later that spring titled “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris.” In his essay, Baudelaire championed the vitality and wildness of Wagner’s music. In Wagner, Baudelaire found a kindred soul and fellow champion of states of ecstatic intoxication. Baudelaire’s countryman, the English teacher Stéphane Mallarmé, would attend Wagner’s operas on Sunday evenings, an act he referred to (sacrilegiously) as “attending Vespers.” This description, however, was perhaps apropos, for Wagner, despite his at times professed Christianity had, in effect, introduced a new religion of aesthetic paganism. Mallarmé was further part of a new movement of French poets who wrote in vers libre or “free verse.” Mallarmé’s work, especially his most famous poem, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard, was, moreover, notoriously enigmatic. Baudelaire and Mallarmé’s verse, drawing from Wagnerism, would have a tremendous influence on Eliot’s Waste Land.

One of the most pronounced—if not the most pronounced (Eliot would, in fact, dedicate The Waste Land to him as “il miglior fabbro”)—influences upon The Waste Land was Ezra Pound. Pound was one of the most tragic figures among the expatriate Americans who helped to develop High Modernism. A native of Idaho, Pound went to Venice in 1908 and then to London where he met key modernist figures and began publishing collections of poetry such as A Lume Spento and A Quinzane for this Yule. Like Eliot, Pound was drawn to the violence and religious intensity as well as the beauty of premodern civilizations. At the same time, Pound wrote in a distinctly modern manner, utilizing free verse, pastiche, and stream-of-consciousness writing. However, while Eliot eventually embraced Christianity and a distinctly Anglo-American conservativism, Pound never escaped paganism, eventually working for the Mussolini government during World War II and being tried for treason and committed to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, DC. Pound nevertheless provided critical editorial aid to Eliot as well as moral encouragement—even if Eliot eventually surpassed him in spiritual maturity.

Eliot’s maturity, however, was a long time coming. The young Eliot’s contemporaries considered him a brooding and wounded man. T.S. Eliot earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1910 and then pursued graduate studies in philosophy in Paris and then back at Harvard. At the same time, influenced by modernists as well as by his own personal ennui and search for spiritual nourishment, Eliot was writing poetry, crafting his first major work “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” during the years 1909–1911—it would eventually be published in Poetry magazine in June of 1915. “Prufrock” mesmerized Ezra Pound, who became one of the poem’s champions. During this time, Eliot met Vivien Haigh-Wood, a deeply modern, but, even more than Eliot, deeply wounded person, whom Eliot eventually married but later had committed to a hospital (Eliot would later remarry). Vivien would nonetheless provide inspiration for The Waste Land, which was composed during Eliot’s own stay in a sanatorium.

Inspired by Wagner and a host of nineteeth- and early twentieth-century poets, as well as Eliot’s own personal trauma, The Waste Land is a radical work, but it is also a deeply traditional work, drawing from a host of Western and Eastern artistic and philosophical works. Moreover, it is not a poem that celebrates the demise of Western civilization. It is not a cynical mockery of beauty, goodness, or truth, but an elegy over the decline of these transcendentals. It is, moreover, a deeply impassioned plea for grace and salvation, a salvation that Eliot believed that only God’s grace could give. Later, Eliot would find this grace and craft a host of prose works defending the West. He would further pen The Four Quartets, a long poem celebrating the joy and love Eliot found in the la vita nuova of the second half of his life, embracing the hope, which as The Four Quartets announces, allows one to have the belief that “all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well . . .”