Eighty-nine years ago, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published for the first time.   Today, Harold Bloom still calls it “indisputably the most influential poem written in English in [the twentieth] century.”  Helen Vendler says it “reached so far beyond its origins in both life and literature that it revolutionized modern verse.”

Call it what you wish, but I call it fucking “difficult.”  It certainly was for me, struggling through its dark misdirections until I finally gave up and burned it.

I’m no Eliot, and no poetry critic has ever accused my poems of being “difficult.”  (Well, maybe “difficult to like.”)

WHen asked if his poems are difficult, T.S. Eliot replied: “We can say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization as it exists at present, must be difficult… The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.”

Well, now there’s an app for that.

Yet somehow I feel I will always read these lines as if they describe my reading of the poem itself:

 

‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’