it's just a waste land now
The saturation of allusions used in The Waste Land presents an interesting question about a poet's motivation for writing and the intentions in creating and sharing one's work. Eliot's chosen strategy of writing footnotes to accompany his poem was compared to two other methods of dealing with the writer/reader relationship: leaving allusions out and writing 'to the lowest common denominator' so that the average reader will understand your work immediately, as practiced by Robert Frost, and at the other end of the writing spectrum, there is the option of writing however your ideas come to your mind, including allusions no matter how obscure, and letting your readers fend for themselves, which is what Ezra Pound chose to do with his writing. These three methods obviously represent different levels of relationships with their audiences, with Robert Frost seeming more acquiescent to the need for poetry to be accessible, and Pound, at the other end, appearing more stubbornly disinterested in making his poetry easily understood. What does this say about their motives? How might this affect their popularity? Could we suppose that Frost had more of an interest in becoming widely read, and wanted to achieve this by connecting with a broader audience? Or might Pound's poetry turn out to be just as popular because it requires closer attention, more study, more work to understand them which would make it more satisfying in the end? Did they even think about these things when they wrote?
Well, T.S. Eliot appears to be on the fence between these two choices - although The Waste Land contains more allusions (and different languages) than you can shake a stick at, he did concede to writing explanatory notes so that the public would be able to see what he was referring to, as well as whence came his inspiration.
To refrain from doing so would have been catastrophic! Can you imagine attacking that poem without those helpful little references found at the bottom of the page? It would end up with the poem doing more of the attacking than vice versa. Even as it exists, many of the footnotes are rather obscure, and some difficult passages remain unexplained completely. It's mindblowing... my mind has been blown. The way that Eliot references everything from Shakespeare and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to a fortuneteller and the barman at a British pub renders this poem so all-inclusive as to catch the interest of all kinds of readers. None of them are completely at ease with its entirety, because depending on their background, they will identify with a different part of the poem. Which in a way, I think, is what brings it together. This borrowing from sources of almost every imagineable background makes it accessible to a number of different readers, while nonetheless remaining highly elusive.
Sticks that have tried to be shaken at all the allusions in The Waste Land.
Laura <3