What the thunder said How the Waste Land made poetry modern

In the wake of his History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (CH, Oct'16, 54-0498) and Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory (CH, May'21, 58-2458), the present volume confirms Rasula's position as the US's most wide-ranging and culturally astute historian of modernism. Rather than offer yet another reading of Eliot's poem, Rasula situates The Waste Land in its cultural context, emphasizing Eliot's debt to Richard Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk, and highlighting the cinematic and paratactic qualities that energized the poem's collage structure, rendering it so strange to its initial audience. Eliot's canny careerism is evident in his establishing an early reputation as a book reviewer and literary critic (Eliot's The Sacred Wood, a collection of essays, appeared two years before The Waste Land). Extensive discussions of Wagner, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Eliot's relationships with his wife Vivian and with Emily Hale, as well as generous selections of the poem's early reviews, both positive and negative, help one see the poem as it was before its canonization and the mass of critical commentary it has accreted since 1922, which Rasula describes as "unabashedly confrontational, renegade, noncompliant, and full of zest" (p. 243). Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers --Gary R. Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College

Scholar Rasula (Genre and Extravagance in the Novel) celebrates the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land with a stimulating cultural history of what he calls "exhibit A of modernism in poetry." Rasula connects The Waste Land to the revolutionary approach taken by composer Richard Wagner, who introduced the concept of "endless melody," which transformed opera into an experience "that would compel attention all the way through." Eliot, Rasula writes, "intuitively grasped Wagner's directive that the poet keep clear of the domain of the speechless," and he shows how other movements, such as symbolism and futurism, played a role in Eliot's work. Rasula masterfully unpacks the poem's "original strangeness," and shows it as a part of a "realm of modernist artifacts that were unabashedly confrontational, renegade, noncompliant, and full of zest," and highlights the influence fellow poets had on Eliot: Ezra Pound acted as "a kind of literary switchboard operator" championing Eliot and providing "editorial finesse" to his work, and Marianne Moore was "a major innovator in the use of collage" with whom Eliot forged a "bond of solidarity." Rasula's account wonderfully traces the evolution of literary thought, and his syntheses feel fresh and exciting. The result is a refreshing reappraisal of a classic. (Dec.)