Arts: Poetry "The Waste Land," great early poem by T. S. Eliot now super-annotated as noted in The New Criterion

For those esoteric lit buffs who would enjoy a thoro annotation (not directly a commentary, not directly a literary critique, mind you) of one of Modernist poetry's greatest achievements in the English lanuage, I find myself delited to be able to pass on to you a note on the work of Lawrence Rainey's new scholarly edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a long poem published often nowadays as a free standing book in itself––together "with Eliot's Contemporary Prose." I take that to mean TSE's prose written around the time of composition of the long poem cited. The title of Rainey's work, unremarkably, now: The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contempory Prose. Not directly and not directly, as said, but still in the value of the achieved content, still it is a remarkable work of litcrit broadly construed, on a great poem broadly admired despite its difficulty, written in a broadly modernist vein with its very own Eliot-composed annotations! So what do we call Rainey's? Meta-annotations? Supplementary annotations? And as to the poem itself, it is also modernist not just as to technique, but also as to worldview, since this poem was composed before Eliot's conversion Christian faith and his taking up the post of warden in a hi-Anglocatholic church in Lodon. It's a work of literary art in the modernist secular humanist vein as the Christain philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd would define "humanist" technically, in terms of the Nature/Freedom dualism of ultimate Western values since the Enlightenment, a worldview hegemonic in our culture, but not totally determinative everywhere in everything cultural. The poet of The Waste Land became also the Christian poet of the Four Quartets (also often published a free-standing book of the four inter-related poems).

I found reference to the Rainey work on Eliot and his poem in The New Criterion, in an item by Adam Kirsch, entitled "Travels in the Waste Land." NC supplies an excerpt from Kirsch's review, but darng! that I can't find the whole litcrit piece from which the Kirsch excerpt is presented. Maybe you'll have better luck at the NC website for their April 2005 edition online. Meantime, here's the excerpt, as a kind of teaser, to be sure:

Here is a book of 260 pages built on a poem of 433 lines—a text-to-commentary ratio appropriate to the Bible or the Greek classics. More than any previous editor, Rainey provides the reader with every resource that might help explain the genesis and significance of the poem. He offers a chronology of its composition, from Eliot’s first passing reference to “a poem that I have in mind,” in November 1919, through its simultaneous publication in The Criterion and The Dial in October 1922. He offers notes on the verse and notes on the notes, including full English quotations of the sources Eliot alludes to or leaves untranslated.

There are many less esoteric articles, essays, and items in NC, with which one may be buffed, buffetted, or buffoonerated to one's hearts content in literary niceties, with critical overcasts reflective of Eliot's call for "discrimination" in the appreciation of works of art. A call which I thawt I found expostulated in a review by Douglas Murray of an IRA drama around the deeply traumatic events of Bloody Sunday sometime back, in Northern Ireland (see my attempt to understand Murray in my May 15, 2005 entry in reWrite, "Arts: Brit critic castigates pro-IRA drama for 'complacent liberals'." I think both NC and Eliot would have recognized the finely-nuanced line of argumentation there, in regard to the art/morals interface in a would-be work of drama as a true artform and literary-artistic genre. - Owlb

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