Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

“ The Waste Land gave the time's most accurate data, / It seemed,” a reminiscent Kenneth Koch wrote of the 1950s (1987: 7). As Koch's “It seemed” wryly suggests, not everyone thought so, though many intellectuals did. The conviction that The Waste Land , a poem published some thirty years before, still spoke for “the time” depended on a sense that one inhabited an elastic historical period that had begun before the First World War and stretched out into some indefinite (and probably dismal) future. One's time was the culturally barren “modern” era, and The Waste Land was its diagnosis. Even today, one finds the poem spoken of loosely as a work of “our time” or of “modern times,” usually with the implication that The Waste Land continues to give “the time's most accurate data.” With its sweeping vision and its tone of urgency, The Waste Land invites and, indeed, almost demands such a reading. And it may be said fairly enough that many of the large problems with which the poem concerns itself remain live issues. War has not grown less brutal, nor the metropolis less alienating, nor commercialism less pervasive since 1922. Yet there is much to be learned by reading The Waste Land , somewhat against its grain, as a poem of its time – as a literary work, in other words, that came out of and expressed something about a particular historical moment frequently termed the Jazz ... log in or subscribe to read full text