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I couldn't imagine a worse way to read literature (although hats off to the creator for the hard work). The beauty of The Waste Land comes from slowly unwrappin
by poet 16y ago
I couldn't imagine a worse way to read literature (although hats off to the creator for the hard work). The beauty of The Waste Land comes from slowly unwrapping the references and allusions yourself. As we know from exploratory programming, there's value in the process of both discovery and understanding. This medium removes discovery.
On a different note, certainly the first read of any poem shouldn't be as cluttered and busy as what's presented here.
- Tycho 16y agoTo be fair, I think most people kickstart their 'unwrapping' of The Waste Land by reading the notes Eliot supplied himself - which are fairly detailed, though not exhaustive (but neither is this webpage. for instance line 25 mentions 'the red rock' I believe is a reference to Mars-->The God of Wa-->/WW1). I agree one should read the pure text to start with, and try to make sense of things by yourself, but you're going to need help at some point. What I like about this is that it lets you see viscerally how interlinked the text is. I like to visualize modernist poems as crystalline datastructures floating through the heap of culture with pointers to other objects in (public) memory. Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem for anyone interested: http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_harp_ITH.html http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_h... Also the text on its own is here http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html I was only a teenager when I first read it (plus it was my first exposure to modernist texts), but it did take me quite a long time to even get past the 'wtf?' stage, until it eventually clicked.