THE WASTE LAND REMAINS CONTEMPORARY: A dazzling new critical biography of T.S. Eliot’s modernist epic.

When I corresponded with Hollis by email about the book, I asked him about [Matthew] Eliot’s idea of tradition, which he treats brilliantly. “All literature is happening at once,” Hollis explained. He went on:

That’s a mind-stretching thought of Eliot’s that deserves some reflection: what exactly did he mean by it? That the writings of the past act upon the writings of the present is hardly a controversial idea, but Eliot was saying something stranger and deeper: that the present also acts upon the past. Influence was not a one-way stream, he believed, but something more like a pool in which time swirls. But how can a contemporary work of art act upon one already made in history? It does so, says Eliot, because the achievements of our age shed new light upon those that have gone before; the past is enlarged because of our contribution to it and is therefore changed by it. We know more than the past because the past is what we know, and we must maintain our connection to it in order to retain our connection to deep culture. Tradition, therefore, becomes a kind of door that we must pass through—and individual talent is the key that opens it.

Hollis also shared with me his sense of Eliot’s astute understanding of how poets help themselves to objects beyond their emotions to express those emotions’ essence—one way out of the narcissistic labyrinth that characterizes too much contemporary poetry. “For an artist to operate across such vast time and space,” Hollis pointed out, “for an art to be transcendental, requires a poet to communicate not with something so private to himself as personal feelings or emotions, but to find a representative for those feelings that can be understood by anyone without a personal connection to the author: it requires, in other words, what Eliot called an ‘objective correlative.’” Since Eliot first broached his famous theory in an essay on Hamlet in 1919 by arguing that Shakespeare’s play was a failure because there was no objective correlative in the play that could have reasonably given rise to Hamlet’s rarefied distress, some readers have tended to see the theory as little more than an excuse for brash revisionism. Yet Hollis is certainly right to see it as one of the governing principles behind the composition of The Waste Land. When Pound spoke of the long poem with all its musical registers as an “emotional unit,” he was nicely encapsulating its achievement. Hollis, too, captures the essence of Eliot’s method: “A reader cannot be expected to take interest in the poet’s emotion, only in the expression of emotion through a form common to both readers and writer alike, namely the senses.” The Waste Land epitomizes that “impersonal” form common to both readers and writer alike. Though a lot of Eliot’s personal emotion went into the composition of the poem, as Hollis so copiously shows, The Waste Land succeeds by giving that emotion its proper objective correlative—not least through its wonderful music.

Read the whole thing.