TS Eliot’s women: the unsung female voices of The Waste Land
A red lever-arch folder, well-loved and battered, sits near me in my office. Throughout my adult life, it has teetered on shelves in various homes, my university dissertation about the women in TS Eliot’s best-known poem, The Waste Land, lying inside – women whose voices felt urgent to me then and still do today.
First published 100 years ago this month in literary journal the Criterion, Eliot’s 434-line poem was instantly notorious. It mixed fragments of languages, religions, references from ancient poems, books, plays, opera and music hall, passages of eloquent speech and scraps of everyday conversations. It translated the restless energy of art movements such as cubism and futurism into vivid words and sounds, uprooting the possibilities of what poetry could be.
It became a landmark for modernism, delving deeply into how fragile people felt in a fast-changing world of shattering empires and realities, especially after the horrors of the first world war. It also reflected Eliot’s state of mind, tortured by the sudden death of his father in 1919, a troubled marriage and his desperation to become an established literary figure (he was still working in a City bank at 33 when he had a breakdown, going to Margate, then a sanatorium in Lausanne, to get treatment and finish writing The Waste Land).
The poem cemented Eliot’s reputation for being a difficult poet, but also communicated profoundly with people. This was partly due to its gothic intensity (catnip for doomy teenagers like the one I used to be) and earwormy lines that still resonate through pop culture (in recent years, and songs by Blossoms, the Airborne Toxic Event and Hot Chip).
