One hundred years ago this past October, T. S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land” was published in the debut issue of The Criterion, the literary magazine he edited in London. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses had appeared a few months earlier, and, ever since, 1922 has been remembered as the annus mirabilis of literary modernism.
“Modern” is a relative term, and after a century most avant-garde artworks have been thoroughly tamed. The French Impressionist painters were seen as wild radicals in the 1870s, and what could be more innocuously pretty today than a Monet landscape? But somehow “The Waste Land” is different. Readers encountering it for the first time still find that this poem demands a different kind of reading than they are used to. It asks us to set aside the questions we usually ask about a piece of writing—whose voice we’re listening to, what exactly it means—and attend instead to the emotional power of its rhythms and images.
