2 ms·
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 yo
by tptacek 10mo 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". (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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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).