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Rating:  - Truly one of the best.
One reviewer claims that this is marred by some of Eliot's unfurtunate preducices. But how come you don't say something like that about O' Henry. We can't just stop reading authers because you we don't like their views. Someone calls hemingway looking forward? If that's looking forward I'de rather look backward. Hemingway has no concept of lyricism what so ever. Most of the people that reviewer named justly loved Eliot. Eliot is not looking nesscarily towards the past, but towards what we have made out of the present. In name of progress, we have destroyed nature and good part of our souls. To call Eliot Conservative at the time he wrote the poem would be redicoulous, the first draft according to one of Eliot's biographers, was absolutly a expression of Relavtism. One critic accused him being a Nihilist.
On the Poem itself Eliot is truly a master at evocating mode and tone, not to mention his brilliant use of Imperfect rymthe. So it doesn't have the crepty sentimentalism and redicoulous forays of expression of eariler and later poets. So he looks at his poetry with a sense of hard classicism, we could use more of that. Yet what he doesn't right he evoces through mode and tone, giving us truly one of the best poems of this, or any other century.
Rating:  - Civilization did not end with Tom Eliot
At one time Eliot stood astride our poetic culture like a colossus . He was the giant and god of twentieth English Literature, the master critic who defined the Tradition and Individual Talent. The 'Wasteland ' was taken to be something like a definitive statement about the whole cultural tradition. The dried- up and dead world , the post First- world War world was the end of what the Tradition gave. And the Tradition brought back in allusions and references , treated ironically was defined and put in its place by the young expatriate bank- clerk whose Pound patron called him the better poet.
Eliot was the writer of many great beautiful poetic lines . And the ' fragments he shored against his ruins were made here into a modern masterpiece. Unfortunately that masterpiece is morally marred by his Anti- Semitism, and of course by the somewhat shallow reading of History which informs the work as a whole . Yet the work did for many define the time , even when Eliot transcended himself and made the high Anglican culture his home, writing himself back in with "Four Quartets"
The allusion, the philosophical and abstract language combined with the precise musical poetry certainly stand in his favor and say that he no doubt is a poet to be reckoned with.
Even those of us old enough to know in our bones long lines of his cannot however forget his Beideker and Blustein his own hatred and misperception, preliminary to the Nazi world to come.
There are some sins even poetic greatness does not forgive.
Rating: - fear not
T. S. Eliot is accused here of obscurantism, conservatism, and elitism, yet I honestly don't know what such criticism intends to accomplish. (I had to look up obscurantism in the dictionary to find out what it meant). The Wasteland is an artistic performance and as such is brilliant. It is not something one reads for simple easy diversion. If that's what you are looking for, read something else. No artist is required to make it easy for the rest of us. The good news is that none of us are prevented from going to TSE's sources, and this he helps us do with clear notes.
(By the way, Ralph Ellison, a music major at Tuskegee, began his training as a literary artist--novelist and essayist--with a thorough study of The Wasteland and its sources, and I gotta tell ya, if its good enough for Mr. Ellison . . .)
But what TSE doesn't do is force-feed us with explanations in the eventuality we don't "get it" (think about it for a moment: even he had to read this other stuff before he wrote the darn thing).
But hey, it's okay if you don't want to do the work: that's what television is for.
Rating:  - Ugh
Williams was right. Eliot has taken poetry twenty years into the past with this poem. While others are experimenting with their poetics, Eliot falls back on an Old World school of writing that would be better obsolete. What's worse is his poems just get worse from here on out (less help from Pound on the editing, maybe?). He should have kept his day job his only job.
Rating: - Great Poem, Great Edition
It truly saddens me to see someone flaunt their idiocy like the previous reviewer ranting about how writers cannot write about social ills; meanwhile, second rate philosophers turned literary Critics can whenever possible.
Simply stated, the poem is one the true benchmarks for twentieth century literature. It is rather difficult in that it is highly allusive, some allusions fall on the rather obscure side (Middleton, Weston) but mostly they are rather well known (Augustine, Dante, the Bible, Baudelaire, Wagner). The experience will prove to be as didactic as well as expressive due to all these allusions in the text. As far as the poem itself goes, it has a definite effect on you when you read it. I remember the first time I read the lines, "I think we are in rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones," and although I couldn't really understand what was going on just yet in the poem, that line as well as many other lines and images, had an affect on me. On the whole the emotional tone of the poem (not to do it injustice and say what it is about) is the spiritual alienation and degradation everyone felt after WWI. It's a quest of sorts, taken on by a persona of Eliot to find meaning amidst "the stony rubbish" that is the world. It sets the philosophy of Buddha and Augustine side by side as it does with the Rg Veda and the Bible in a collage of different voices and arresting images.
A good guide though is imperative for undertaking this task and this edition is, to my knowledge, the best one out there. It gives many of the primary texts alluded to by Eliot in this poem as well as serving as a good introduction to the mountains of criticism that this poem has birthed. All in all, the book is a great buy for those who are interested in gaining a true appreciation and understanding of this poem and for twentieth century poetry which it influenced so much.
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