5 ms·
The First Eighteen Lines of the Waste Land (1989)
- comrade1234 8mo agoAnyone else play wasteland on the apple II? Would have been around '88. Not sure what the link is about.
- LaundroMat 8mo agoIt's about the poem by T.S. Eliot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land
- IAmBroom 8mo agoGive it up. They can't read.
- adzm 8mo ago> I will show you fear in a handful of dust this gets quoted often as well. Always a fan of TS Eliot. The musical Cats didn't do his book justice, but still
- tptacek 8mo agoI've been fascinated with The Waste Land ever since junior year of high school, when my creative writing teacher saw a copy of it on my desk and said "why do you have that, you'll never understand it". (I mean, fair enough.) This is interesting backstory! My perception of the poem is that it's sort of a fractal of backstory and that everywhere you look you find 2000-word articles on its historical antecedents, from Eliot's life, from the history of Europe, from friends of his lost in the war, &c. There's a whole book on this that's very similar to the article: https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-Biography-Poem/dp/0393240258 https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-Biography-Poem/dp/03932402... If you're bored, you can also kick back and bounce sections of it off Claude or GPT5 (or both and have them argue with each other). I wonder how directly you can connect Ludwig to the Fisher King.
- tolerance 8mo ago> I've been fascinated with The Waste Land ever since junior year of high school, when my creative writing teacher saw a copy of it on my desk and said "why do you have that, you'll never understand it”. Was Teach’ really that crude or do you figure they were just trying to light a fire up under ye.
- gsf_emergency_6 8mo agoLudwig -> Wagner -> Parzifal -> Fisher King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parzival#:~:text=Perhaps%20the%20best,of%20the%20opera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parzival#:~:text=Perhaps%20the... (aiui Wagner merged FK into the German fork)
- FreakLegion 8mo agoParaphrasing Coase: If you torture the poem long enough, it'll confess to anything. The most insightful book on The Waste Land, I've found, is the early drafts and revisions of The Waste Land (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0156948702 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0156948702).
- matthewsinclair 8mo agoThat article is fantastically well written. What a trip.
- iberator 8mo agoCheckout BOOMTOWN game of you liked wasteland. It's a hidden complex game.
- atombender 8mo agoAnyone who liked this article and like (or are curious about) the poem should check out the great Fiona Shaw's reading of it [1]. You can find recordings by many fine actor such as John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, and many others, and they tend to be dull, monotonous affairs. Shaw is very different. She's is an incredible actress, and since the 1990s she's been perfecting the poem as a kind of one-woman show where she reads it as the voices of many characters, which is what the poem (as I understand it) is. [1] https://youtu.be/lPB_17rbNXk https://youtu.be/lPB_17rbNXk
- tptacek 8mo agoHave you ever listened to Eliot reading it? Just the worst. "Apreel is the crewellest month..." My thing here though is: this is awesome, Shaw's reading, but is it right? I feel like she's trying to make a coherent character reading at times out of passages deliberately written not to have a clear narrator. (I write this in the spirit of every thread needing a certain titration of not knowing what the hell they're talking about, as an invitation to those who do, and that inviting cluelessness is the purpose I serve here.)
- gsf_emergency_6 8mo agoI don't know what I'm talking about either, but I'll also point to some scholars approaching TSE from the Econs angle https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2024/gundermantseliot.html#:~:text=In%20%E2%80%9CThe%20Waste%20Land%2C%E2%80%9D%20Eliot%20writes%2C%20%E2%80%9CI%20will%20show%20you%20fear%20in%20a%20handful%20of%20dust.%E2%80%9D https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2024/gundermantseli...
- bandrami 8mo agoOne of the most annoying things I ever learned about T S Eliot is that he was born in Missouri and didn't move to the UK until his late 20s and just entirely made up that accent.
- gsf_emergency_6 8mo agoSome ai assisted takes here https://www.quora.com/Did-T-S-Eliot-retain-his-American-accent-after-he-moved-to-England https://www.quora.com/Did-T-S-Eliot-retain-his-American-acce... He's from a Boston Brahmin family so I doubt he had a real missouri accent to begin with Edit These are apparently from 1930s https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Eliot.php https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Eliot.php Where some Midwestern features are still present ? Especially here, after the 2m32s mark https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Eliot/Eliot-TS_24_Sweeney-Among-the-Nightingales-and-dissertation_Speech-Lab-Recordings_New-York_1935.mp3 https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Eliot/Eliot-TS...
- zwaps 8mo agoVery interesting assertion that these would be the most familiar opening lines of any poem in the 20th century. Even if one only read English poems, as the author did, how about Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both
- getoj 8mo agoI agree. In fact they are not even the most familiar opening lines by this poet: “Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table”
- aidenn0 8mo agoOr Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landside / No escape from reality
- Loughla 8mo agoHow about Howl for the over 18 crowd though? I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, [. . .] Or is that not a well known poem, because I think it is.
- IAmBroom 8mo ago"In Flanders fields the poppies blow ... Between the crosses, row on row."
- ninalanyon 8mo agoHow about Dylan Thomas: "Do not gentle into that good night" or "To begin at the beginning It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbled streets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat- bobbing sea"
- aidenn0 8mo agoThis is a lot of print on the question of why a specific lake was chosen as a location in a poem, and it happened primarily because of the prominence of the poem in question. I imagine that there are many poems deemed less important that could also stand such scrutiny.