T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land. Our personal histories with Eliot. The pleasures of literary difficulty. Mythic method: the Holy Grail, the Fisher King, and Eliot’s satire of the occult. Infinite levels of meaning. Voices of The Waste Land. Eliot’s anti-Semitism as projected self-hatred. Mythic method redux: Philomel, Tereus, and Eliot’s ode to a nightingale. Images of The Waste Land. Reading poetry like a novel. Eliot’s cosmopolitanism. Would you rather be in London, the desert, or the Ganges? Eliot’s transitions, Tiresias’s transitions. Four Quartets. Eliot’s religious conversion. The politics of Four Quartets. Inclusive nationalism vs. regicidal republicanism. Eliot’s raid on the inarticulate. Eliot’s mysticism and paradoxes: re-associating sensibility.
Notes: my essay on The Waste Land and Four Quartets is here; my novel, Portraits and Ashes, mentioned twice this episode, is available for sale at Amazon here and also most other places where books are sold online.
Ep. 12. The Fire and the Rose