| Description |
In recent years, much of the critical attention directed at The Waste Land has stemmed from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on the ways Eliot's poem is a text about reading. In focusing their energies on the text itself, and upon the ways in which the poem's reader is invited to participate in the creative process, these critics seem to have avoided the pitfalls inherent in assigning any ultimate meaning to the text. They focus on how the text says, rather than what is said, thereby acknowledging and respecting one of Eliot's favored means of literary criticism set forth in ON Poetry and Poets - that of setting readers "face to face" with the text, then "leaving [them] alone with it." Following in the spirit of this enlightening criticism, this essay will supplement the discussion of The Waste Land in terms of how it interacts with its reader by recording one close reading of the poem's first three parts. Initially, I was troubled by the idea of halting the analysis "mid-stream," but in retrospect, it seems somewhat consistent with Eliot's idea of setting another reader "face to face" with the Waste Land and subsequently withdrawing, without closure, to allow plenty of room for personal interpretation. Eliot, I believe, would understand. |
