Revisiting "The Waste Land"

by Lawrence Rainey

This groundbreaking book of literary detective work alters our understanding of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land . Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem but also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot’s greatest achievement and on the poem’s place in the modern canon.
Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, The Waste Land turns out to be something quite something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet’s intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Lawrence S. Rainey is a university professor and writer/editor on the classic works of Anglo-American modernism.

Reviews

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

impossible to take in, i skimmed much of it because much of it consists of minute analysis of the very pieces of paper on which eliot wrote not just the waste land but everything else in the same period, one's mind revolts to consider the undertaking of such a process, the study of millimetric measurements of paper size and printing marks, the differences between typewriters. and then the complicated process of publication is put under a stronger microscope than ever before, that too dulls. one is relieved to come across the light as a feather third chapter touching only on a handful of reviews. and then after that the book proper ends, with more than half the total pagecount being notes and tables, notes and tables, every surviving sheet of paper put onto a grid. one wonders what is gained