This book offers fresh commentary on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", a book of modernist poetry published in 1922. It aims to be both a part-by-part analysis of the poem with periodic summations and a meditation on the limits of interpretation and the problematic nature of reading in the late 20th century. Bringing both Eliot's philosophical writings and contemporary theory to their interpretation, the authors aim to demonstrate that in his early essays and poems, Eliot anticipated by over 50 years basic insights of contemporary theory. Using "The Waste Land" as their reference point, they clarify the manner in which modernist texts both insist upon and defeat interpretation. Brooker and Bentley aim to address specialists and nonspecialists at once, introducing the uninitiated to their subject and establishing for the scholar the context and ground of their argument. They conclude with a discussion of the relation of Eliot's art to his early life and of modernism to infant epistemology.

Reading The waste land: Modernism and the limits of interpretation

Literature & Fiction

Brooker, Jewel Spears

Bentley, Joseph

History & Criticism

University of Massachusetts Press

Single most important study of T. S. Eliot to have appeared in the last twenty years. Essential reading.

Reading "The Waste Land": Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation

This book examines modernism as a cultural and literary phenomenon. Jewel Spears Brooker distinguishes between two groups of modernists, one consisting mostly of exiles and characterized by internationalism and intellectual complexity, the other comprising primarily artists who consciously resist the aesthetic and political tendencies of the first group.

Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism

Univ of Massachusetts Pr

What principles connect--and what distinctions separate--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Four Quartets? The thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot's early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles--dialectic and relativism--constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot's imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence. Brooker considers Eliot's poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet's intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive--moving from texts to theories--and comparative--juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot's mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry--Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot's poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.

T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)

Johns Hopkins University Press

Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism