Viva Modern Critical Interpretations The Waste Land

In its novel use of fragmentary voices, dense allusiveness, mythic structures, urban setting, coiling irony, and unabashed difficulty, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land epitomizes the central thematic and stylistic tendencies of modern literature. Published in 1922, the poem reflects the profound sense of disillusionment that emerged in the wake of World War I, and yet, as new research has helped to show, The Waste Land is also a deeply personal poem, laden with connections to Eliot’s private life. The essays in this newly updated collection respond in a variety of ways to the complexities of this most deliberately and self-consciously complex of modern American poems. Certainly one of the strongest of the obscure impulses behind The Waste Land is Eliot’s recurring dread that his poetic springs have run dry. April stands for a new season of poetic creation, "breeding" poems out of the detritus of his literary inheritance and notebook drafts. — Gregory S. Jay The Waste Land has always been a scene of implicit collaboration between the male poet and his male reader, in which Eliot’s hysterical discourse, by the act of collusive, collaborative interpretation—by the reader’s analytic listening—suffers a sea change into masculinity. — Wayne Koestenbaum VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor’s note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the author’s life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.