The world, in a handful of words
The world, in a handful of words
I recently read Matthew Hollis’ terrific book, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. It’s a wonderful book – smart, well-researched, interesting. If you are interested at all in that particular poem, or Eliot, or the collaborative alchemy that he had with Pound as reader and editor for that project, I highly recommend it. In reading Hollis, and in thinking about The Waste Land, I realized that it was the first poem I ever really fell in love with.
Which is maybe a weird thing to say, because The Waste Land as a poem is difficult and alienating and even often ugly. It’s not “Sonnet 116” or “She Walks in Beauty” or “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”. In fact, one of the early reviews, quoted by Hollis, said “A grunt would serve equally well” (London Mercury, October 1923). And while I strenuously disagree with that, the fact remains that The Waste Land is perhaps a non-obvious choice of first beloved.
And yet.
I truly can’t remember a time when poetry wasn’t a part of my life. I remember being given a volume of Frost and one of Dickinson for Christmas when I was 8, both large, soft cover, the poems printed on illustrated pages. I remember liking Frost better then, though I have come to love Dickinson as well. But my most favorite poet at the time was Shel Silverstein, and I can still recite various of his poems from memory.
Still, there’s a difference between liking something a lot, and falling in love. My first reading of The Waste Land in high school was love. It was different from what I was used to and a challenge – I definitely didn’t understand all the references, even with the end notes (And end notes! In a poem!) it was strange and shifting and protean. Full of references and allusions, almost all of which were to things that at that point I hadn’t read. Some I’d never even heard of!
Looking back, it’s a wonder that I didn’t hate it, for all those reasons, but instead, they were a part of why I loved it. Not just the fact that by “breeding/ lilacs out of the dead land” my hair had stood on end. But because even before that, there was the poem’s epigraph, the Cumaean Sibyl, who wants to die. Reading the poem felt, for me, like walking down a long corridor full of doors, and each of those doors opening to a new path. It felt wildly expansive, which is a thing I love in art – that something is more than it initially appears, that it is continually unfolding. I didn’t see fear in that handful of dust, I saw worlds in it.
Reading The Waste Land, thinking about it in that fashion, gave me a new appreciation for poetry, and for its possibilities. It caused me to move beyond thinking of poems as structure and rhyme (even though I also love those things) and to think of them also as allusion and metaphor, as sound and as language play. As things that could be ambiguous, fragmented, strange. And that I could allow them to be those things without feeling the perfectionist need to pin down answers.
Fragments we have shored against our ruins, yes. But also: opened doors. Foundation and possibility. And that, to me, is love.
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