31 October 1923: Charles Powell finds TS Eliot’s poem a ‘mad medley’ and wishes it was written in demotic English
The Waste Land. By TS Eliot. Richmond; Hogarth Press. Pp 35. 4s,6d,net
This poem is 430 lines, with a page of notes to every three pages of text, is not for the ordinary reader. He will make nothing of it. Its five sections, called successively The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, and so on, for all they signify to him, might as well be called “Tom Thumb at the Giant’s Causeway” or the “The Devil among the Bailiffs,” and so on. The thing is a mad medley. It has a plan, because its author says so; and presumably it has some meaning because he speaks of its symbolism; but meaning, plan, and intention alike are massed behind a smokescreen of anthropological and literary erudition, and only the pundit, the pedant, or the clairvoyant will be in the least aware of them.
