Waste Land

by Stephen Coote

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 1985

About the author

Stephen Coote is the author of several acclaimed biographies including Royal Survivor: The Life of Charles II, Samuel Pepys, and John Keats: A Life. He was educated at Magdelene College, Cambridge and at Birkbeck College, University of London. He lives in Oxfordshire, England.

Reviews

[Warwick Stubbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of these places, like the broken remains in the desert, were once a part of a coherent pattern of myth and culture which has now collapsed. We both sense and long for their sometime order, but instead, we have to pick our difficult and often confusing way amid the ruins of culture. Such is the form of the poem: that of the broken remains of coherence violently and sometimes confusingly juxtaposed. - p. 65

Whether you agree with certain perspectives of Cootes or not in relation to either Eliot or The Waste Land, this ends up being an excellent study of the work using Eliot's own notes to search for deeper meanings and connections. What it absolutely provides is a solid overview of how Eliot synthesised many sources from the past to create his vision of a present "without faith". This is essentially the concept behind "The Waste Land" - that it is a world suffering from faithlessness that Eliot finds himself in. It is a Christian perspective, but bears very little relevance to modernity (in my opinion). Still, the work itself is of great relevance, especially to modernity in all artistic forms. Eliot had to dispense with the forms of the past in order to create this work, and thus, along with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, gave great weight and importance to poetry and literature in the new age.