Rory Sanger

T.S. Eliot defined poetry as ‘an escape from emotion [and] an escape from personality’[1], and Eliot’s magnum opus, The Waste Land[2], is most certainly an ‘escape’; not just from emotions and personality, but from the entire modern world. It is a poem of sensory evocation and bleak post-war disillusionment, yet more tellingly, a ‘musical astonishment’[3]; Virginia Woolf for one, described that ‘its maker seemed to sing it aloud’[4]. With its structural characteristics, and allusions to a broad spectrum of music, it is undoubtedly a musically rich work of literature. It ‘is entirely possible that the thriving musical atmosphere of St. Louis in the 1890s and early 1900s provided [Eliot] with his first important knowledge of music’[5], a climate that would spark a vast influence on Eliot’s poetry. References to both popular and classical music and their structures contribute to the musical complexity of The Waste Land, where music and poetry interweave and go hand in hand.

As noted by several critics, Eliot owes much of his poem’s allusions to the operas of Richard Wagner. Margaret E. Dana describes the ‘new surge of interest in Wagner’s work’[6] that occurred in London in 1914, when the first complete productions of his 1882 opera Parsifal, were staged. This event was crucial as it coincided with Eliot’s first year living in London, and references to Parsifal in Eliot’s work suggest that he likely attended the opera[7]. Furthermore, it has also been noted how Eliot utilised ‘Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk’[8], (German for ‘complete art’; meaning to combine several art forms within one work of art), which would justify his strong desire to marry poetry and music by giving The Waste Land Wagnerian characteristics. The idea then, that ‘literary critics have known little or nothing of music as an art’[9] is rectified by Wagner’s theory of using synergic art forms that Eliot embraced.

As well as being influenced by Wagner, Eliot was enthralled by Igor Stravinsky’s work too. Upon first experiencing The Rite of Spring, he wrote that the ballet evoked the ‘barbaric noises of modern life’ [10]. This observation creates inextricable links between sound and music that may account for Eliot’s frequent onomatopoeia in The Waste Land, for example: ‘Twit twit twit/Jug jug jug jug jug jug’ and the twice-appearing ‘Weialala leia…’[11], the latter another Wagnerian reference to his 1876 opera, Götterdämmerung.

Most surprisingly, Stravinsky’s experience of reading emotive Russian folk poems led him to contemplate in his autobiography that ‘music is, by its very nature essentially powerless to express anything at all…’[12]. Stravinsky’s astonishing revelation further justifies the need to use music in conjunction with other art forms in order to communicate the truest form of expression possible.

If we are to propose the idea that Eliot’s poems read like musical compositions, then we must examine the significance of his poetic epigraphs. Nicolosi has suggested that ‘their function is often similar to a composer’s use of key signature and tempo markings’[13] written to precede a piece of music. Accordingly, the complexity of the multiple languages and use of Greek alphabet in The Waste Land’s epigraph[14] suggest that the poem is a complex ‘composition’, and its dedication to Ezra Pound, the poem’s editor[15], adds a ‘composer’ to the work.

‘The multiple voices of the poem may be seen as analogous to multiple instruments accompanied by an orchestral commentary’[16]. This observation opens up the possibility of studying musical counterpoint in Eliot’s poem. The shift from the overpowering sensory description that opens Part II[17] of The Waste Land into the paranoid dialogue that follows it, is jarring: ‘“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak?…”’[18]. These dissonant staccato speech fragments create a prime example of counterpoint from the preceding eloquent and ‘melodic’ passage. Dana suggests that the repeated word ‘nothing’ that is spoken later[19] ‘becomes a drum beat as [the speaker] pounds against [a] lack of response’[20], though this idea is easily applicable to the words ‘speak’ and ‘thinking’ in this passage. Counterpoint is stirred up from Eliot’s classical music influences, though the percussive elements that creep into the poem’s voices are indebted to the more rhythmic popular music of the 1910s and 1920s.

Jazz and popular music references occur in The Waste Land as a contrast to such classical references, the most apt example of this being Eliot’s reworking of ‘That Shakespearean Rag’, a hit song of 1912[21]:

O O O O that Shakespeherian rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent[22]

David E. Chinitz has raised the point that it is ‘unfortunate that critics have made so little of Eliot’s quotation of the song’[23], surprising given how insightful the extract is in relation to music. These lines bridge connections between both high culture and popular culture. The misspelling of ‘Shakespearean' as ‘Shakespeherian’ demotes Shakespeare to an unacademic status, especially when juxtaposed with a ‘rag’ and satirised with the ironic succeeding couplet of ‘elegant’ and ‘intelligent’. Oppositely, the ‘rag’ is promoted to a grand cultured status in a mockery of modern society too. But of course, these poetic devices and techniques function rhythmically too.

In Jeremy Irons’s and Eileen Atkins’s 2012 reading of the poem, Irons intonates the reading of this section in a way that evokes swung styles of popular jazz, the extra syllable of ‘Shakespeherian’ instrumental in emphasising the swung meter of the lines[24]. We must not lose sight of the fact that this is a contemporary reading; it could potentially be argued that Irons’ musical intonation evokes the swing music style more in vogue in the 1930s and 1940s, making it anachronistic with regard to The Waste Land. Although, whether or not this is the case does not detract from the fact that music is an essential part of the oral reading of Eliot’s poem.

In 1965, the year Eliot died, a reincarnation of The Waste Land emerged in the form of Bob Dylan’s eleven-minute epic song ‘Desolation Row’. A lengthy and bleak portrait of 1960s America, it even musically immortalised the modernist poets with the lyric ‘And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower’[25]. The Waste Land’s legacy in influencing Dylan’s songwriting highlights not only the significance of its musical legacy, but also demonstrates its allegorical timelessness when applied to an updated context. We can think of The Waste Land as a literary intersection of art forms: Eliot absorbed musical influences from Wagner, Stravinsky, jazz and popular music and transformed them into a poetic form, and then projected a musical legacy that inspired songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and David Bowie[26]. Without music, The Waste Land would become a haphazard and melancholic work of verse; it is the topical and classical references, rich allusions and aesthetic focus on melody, counterpoint and rhythm, that make Eliot’s poem a work of synergy owing just as much to music as it does to poetry.

Citations:

[1] T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ in The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism - Third Edition, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2018), 890.

[2] T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ [1922] in Collected Poems 1909-1935 (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 59-84.

[3] Robert Crawford, Young Eliot - From St Louis to ‘The Waste Land’ (London: Vintage, 2015), 10.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Robert J. Nicolosi, ‘T.S. Eliot and Music: An Introduction’, The Musical Quarterly 66, no.2 (April 1980): 194.

[6] Margaret E. Dana, ‘Orchestrating The Waste Land’ in T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra - Critical Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. John Xiros Cooper (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 268.

[7] Ibid.

[8] David E. Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 208n. 41.

[9] Paul Chancellor, ‘The Music of “The Waste Land”’, Comparative Literature Studies 6 (1969): 21.

[10] Quoted in Daniel Albright, ‘Series Editor’s Forward’ in T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, ix.

[11] Eliot, 'The Waste Land', lines 203-204, 277-278, 290-291.

[12] Quoted in Nicolosi, ‘T.S. Eliot and Music…’, 202.

[13] Ibid, 194.

[14] Eliot, 'The Waste Land', 59.

[15] William Van O’Connor, Ezra Pound - American Writers 26: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), 35.

[16] Dana, ‘Orchestrating The Waste Land’, 272.

[17] Eliot, 'The Waste Land', lines 77-110.

[18] Ibid, lines 111-114.

[19] Ibid, lines 122-123.

[20] Dana, ‘Orchestrating The Waste Land’, 277.

[21] B. R. McElderry Jr., ‘Eliot’s ‘Shakespeherian Rag’’ American Quarterly 9, no.2 (Summer 1957): 185.

[22] Eliot, 'The Waste Land', lines 128-130.

[23] Chinitz, …Cultural Divide, 46.

[24] ’T. S. Eliot - 'The Waste Land' (Jeremy Irons & Eileen Atkins)’, YouTube video, 27:44, a reading of the poem originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 30 March 2012, posted on 21 January, 2017, by ‘jssmrenton’, accessed 17 November, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYROFY_Kh8M

[25] Bob Dylan, ’Desolation Row | The Official Bob Dylan Site’, accessed 17 November, 2018, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/desolation-row/

[26] Dorian Lynskey, ‘I will show you Arcade Fire in a handful of dust: why pop music loves TS Eliot’, The Guardian, 23 May, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2012/may/23/ts-eliot-poetry-pop-music