Trivia / The Waste Land

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• Creator Breakdown: Eliot and his first wife Vivienne both suffered breakdowns during the extended composition of the poem, and he was always open about the extent to which she contributed to it, so this applies to both of them.^note To be specific, her handwritten comments are all over the manuscript, and he incorporated a good deal of her advice and suggestions; she registered her strong enthusiasm for the "My nerves are bad tonight" sequence, which seems to be a snapshot of the Eliots' domestic life, and it's generally acknowledged that she had a hand in the composition of the conversation between the Cockney women in the pub, notably contributing the Armor-Piercing Question "What you get married for if you don't want children?"
  • Some of Eliot's peers found this poem incomprehensible, ambiguous and incoherent. H. P. Lovecraft was among many to speculate that this was Eliot's My Immortal, that he was trolling the readers or pulling their leg. Lovecraft's quasi-Joycean parody, Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance, is delightfully refreshing to anyone who's had this inflicted on them in school.
• Shrug of God: Eliot refrained from giving a straight answer to what the poem is about. Claude Colleer Abbott, a poet and contemporary who liked the poem, wrote to Eliot and asked him to tell him more about it. Eliot declined and replied that the legitimate meaning of the poem is that which it has for the reader, not that which it has for the author; he points out that the author is merely one interpreter among many.
  "I am pleased that you like The Waste Land and wish that I could tell you more about it. It is not an evasion, but merely the truth, to say that I think in these cases that an explanation by the author is of no more value than one by anybody else. You see, the only legitimate meaning of a poem is the meaning which it has for any reader, not a meaning which it has primarily for the author. The author means all sorts of things which concern nobody else but himself, in that he may be making use of his private experiences. But these private experiences are merely crude material, and as such of no interest whatever to the public."
  • Granting this, Eliot said in a lecture that so many literary critics interpreted it as a social commentary on the contemporary world when Eliot himself said: "To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling..."
• Throw It In!: When Vivienne Eliot read the manuscript, she loved the scenes between the neurotic wife and her husband, and also the scene in the pub. In the page margins of the latter episode, she wrote the lines "If you don’t like it you can get on with it" and "What you get married for if you don’t want to have children?", lines she’d presumably overheard in pubs. Eliot incorporated them into the poem, slightly modified.
• Working Title: The working title was He Do The Police In Different Voices, a Shout-Out to Charles Dickens, specifically Our Mutual Friend:
  “[...]I ain't, you must know,” said Betty, “much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”

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