Revisiting "The Waste Land"
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Lawrence Rainey
Out of Print
Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, The Waste Land turns out to be something quite different: 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.
“[A] work of critical intelligence respectful of the literary sophistication of this full-grown Modernist… [It] is in the passages where Rainey demonstrates the ‘local, contingent, and retrospective’ nature of the poem’s composition that his research rises from original scholarship to creative criticism, entering sympathetically into the lyrical process and restoring the written fact of the poem to the reader.” - Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement
"Revisiting The Waste Land will be an indispensable text for future readers of Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, for both its exhilarating scholarly revelations and its energizing recovery of the poem’s original uncanniness."—David Chinitz, author of T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide
"The most significant contribution to Eliot scholarship since the facsimile edition of the manuscripts appeared in 1971. Rainey finally and definitively solves the problems of composition and chronology that have eluded prominent scholars these thirty-three years, and places not only the poem but also the emergence of modernism itself on a new plane of understanding."—Ronald Schuchard, Emory University
Publication Date: May 10, 2005
7 b/w illus.