The problem is not that Eliot put poetry on the wrong track. It’s that he went as far down that track as anyone could, exhausting its possibilities and leaving little or no work for those who came after him. It is precisely this mystique of belatedness that is the source of Eliot’s considerable power. What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.
I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.
Can it be revived? The political theorist Fredric Jameson has said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. For my part, I have an easier time conceiving of a world socialist utopia than I do a revival of poetry in English.
Matthew Walther, "Poetry Died a Hundred Years Ago This Month"
It's not that Eliot finished it off, but in his writing "The Wasteland", he wrote its epitaph.
It's not that nobody writes poetry anymore; it's that normal educated, people don't really care. It's not that nobody is religious any more; it's that normal, educated people don't really care.
It's not that the Living Real that is necessary to make poetry and religion vital isn't there anymore; it's just that religion and poetry no longer provide a portal to it for most normal people. Some might force themselves to read poetry or go to the occasional reading, but they do not leave edified. Same with church. There are exceptions, of course, but not enough to have a broad cultural impact. Other distractions keep us better entertained. There has to be something in you that lights up when in the presence of something that radiates light. Is the problem that nothing is shining or that we have lost the capacity to see it?
I remember when I first read "The Waste Land" in my late teens. I had much the same response to it that Walther had. He says--
In those days, for reasons I could not understand (and would not wish to understand even now, lest the magic be dispelled), the poems seemed to have an incantatory power. I distinctly recall sitting at the back of the school bus and repeating, mantra-like, the following lines from “The Waste Land”: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?”
For me it was the opening lines-
April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.
And like Walther, I'm not sure why it evokes what it does. If I were to struggle to put it into words, it's the peculiar mood of expectation that is likely to be frustrated. Like expecting to find a truth that is mysterious and beautiful and instead to find something that is bloody, oozey, and fetid. What we find is true, but is that the whole of it? If spring is the season of hope, April is the month of primal, larval stirring. There is new life there, and with it the promise of beauty, but no beauty yet. When immersed in April's mood, it's hard to hope that it will ever come.
And so it's fitting that that's the way Eliot's poem begins because the mood of the poem doesn't change much until the end. (But it does change.) It's mostly about about life forms that are only a few degrees ascended from chaos. For the mood of the poem is that of chaos, dissociation--of a world we have no good reason to think is capable making promises much less delivering on them. Perhaps other people lived in other times and places when such promises were made and kept, but that it not our time and our place. We must wander instead in the wasteland. If there's a new world waiting to be born, all we can know of it now is the ugly, cruel, muddy April of it, and there's little in that to cheer the soul.
And so I think that Walther is onto something when he talks about how the death of poetry was announced with Eliot's publication of "The Wasteland". Dreyfus & Kelly indirectly support the assertion when discussing Heidegger's ideas about how great art either focuses or reconfigures a society's understanding of itself:
Temples, cathedrals, epics, plays, and other works of art focus and hold up to a culture what counts as a life worth aspiring to. Works of art in this sense do not represent something else—the way a photograph of one’s children represents them. Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that the temple “portrays nothing.” Rather, works of art work; they gather practices together to focus and manifest a way of life. When works of art shine, they illuminate and glamorize a way of life, and all other things shine in their light. A work of art embodies the truth of its world.
Of course the temple or the tragedy can only shine in this way when it exists in the context of a living community organized around it. The same Greek temple today, decaying in a desolate rock-cleft valley, cannot be organizing a culture; it cannot focus, glamorize, and stabilize a whole understanding of being for the people whose lives are organized around it. It no longer “gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.” The temple today can, of course, be an object of aesthetic appreciation. It can elicit “oohs” and “aahs” from the tourists who are standing beside it. But when a Greek temple or a medieval cathedral plays this role, it is no longer “working” as a work of art.
All Things Shining, pp. 101-02
If for Heidegger a "work of art embodies the truth of its world", he meant, according to D&K, the way that Homer's Iliad & Odyssesy, Aeschylus's Oresteia, Dante's Divine Comedy embodied the truth of theirs. But I'd argue that in a similar way that "The Wasteland" embodies the truth of ours. Is it possible to have truly meaningful art if there is no living community to be organized by it? Is what we call late-modern society "living" in any deep, richly meaningful sense of the word? Is there any future work of art that will have the vitality to organize what now seems utterly incapable of either spiritual life or organization?
And so for this reason I think that "The Wasteland" performs Heidegger's focusing function for a work of art ironically: it "embodies the truth of its world," but does so for a society that is itself spiritually dead after the death of God and the death of poetry. "The Wasteland" as a work of art hasn't the vitality to organize a world around it, but just enough to hold a mirror up to it so that we may see in it what has become of us. Is there any poem written since then that has had the broad, cultural resonance that this poem had and still has? Everything written after it seems imitative or at best a clever variation on the same theme. But mostly such subsequent work is tiresome because there's only so much you can say about fragmentation and chaos.
But April is the cruelest month not because it's about death, but because it's about an awakening of life when we'd rather remain asleep. April is muck and mire and dimly realized, inchoate life. It's the pain of childbirth; it's something we'd rather avoid dealing with if at all possible. Let me roll over and sleep and dream until May, if you don't mind.
No May poems or June poems can be written now because they would be out of season. But May and June don't arrive without passing through April, and if we sleep through all the ways April discomforts us, it's not likely we'll wake up later.