Absolutely.

Grad lit program and hasn’t read “The Waste Land.” Very depressing fact, although probably not surprising.

Yes, I read that “New Yorker” article on Eliot and Vivienne. I keep track of my opponents. As well as this “New Yorker” commemoration by Cynthia Ozick.
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A CRITIC AT LARGE about the poet T.S. Eliot, who once was a commanding literary figure whose formulations were revered. It’s impossible nowadays to imagine such authority accruing to a poet. In his person, if not in his poetry, Eliot was false coinage. Born in St, Louis, he became indistinguishable from a proper British Tory. Such unalloyed self-alteration suggests a hatred of the original design. And certainly Eliot condemned the optimism of democratic American meliorism, he despised Unitarianism, centered less on personal salvation than on social good, & he had contempt for Jews as marginal, if not inimical to his concept of Christian community. In the 40s & 50s Eliot was absolute art: high art when art was its most serious & elitist. Eliot’s aristocratic ideas which some might call Eurocentric & obscurantist no longer interest most literary intellectuals. The biographies that have appeared in recent years have brought Eliot down to human scale. They’ve exposed the nightmare of Eliot’s first marriage & its devastating evolution. It is in the nature of fame to undergo revision: Eliot appears now to be similarly receding into the parochial, even the sectarian. His reach, once broad enough to incorporate the Upanishads, shrank to extend no farther than the neighborhood sacristy, & to a still smaller place the closet of the self. The chief elements of the Age of Eliot are no longer with us & may never return: the belief that poetry can be redemptive; the conviction that history underlies poetry.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/11/20/t-s-eliot-at-101
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Today it’s lost how much of an authoritative figure T.S. Eliot posed in his heyday. He was on the cover of “Time.” He was a god, Now he’s near-forgotten.

The other day a cafe friend who’s in the grad lit program at UNM asked me what I was up to. I told her I was immersing myself in “The Waste Land.” She hadn’t read it. She asked me why I was.

I said “The Waste Land” was on my bucket list. That’s the truth of it. It’s unfinished business with an old enemy, whom I now understand better as a kinda friend and certainly a flawed, kindred spirit.

“McGuinn and McGuire couldn’t get no higher”

Which maybe explains one of my favorite old songs,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9cINH9yob4

The studio version which I always seem to prefer,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR0W_ySd_Do

Back in the day, I had no idea who McGuinn and McGuire were.

I saw the film when it came out. Don’t remember it all that well but I don’t think I much cared for it.

As far as the poems go, to me the more personal parts are the best. They’re also the most “poetic,” in my opinion.

I’m more fond of old T.S. these days, but I don’t take his side against Vivienne. I mostly assume they were both plenty screwed-up.

My point is, that as great a poem as “The Waste Land” is, Eliot’s personal issues were as much a factor as the Big Think stuff about WWI and the decline of Western Civ.

I recall liking the “Tom & Viv” film with no less than Willem Dafoe and the always remarkable Miranda Richardson as T.S. and Vivienne. (Did you?) I’ll be revisiting it this weekend.

I have a conflicted relationship with T.S. Eliot.

At first I thought you were referencing this Barry McGuire:
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The Eastern world, it is explodin’
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’

–“Barry McGuire – Eve Of Destruction” (1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfZVu0alU0I
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How far we haven’t come….

Maybe you had to have been there.

I have always liked “The Waste Land,” although I think I very slightly prefer “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I read them both in high school and didn’t understand a lot of the Wasteland references, but I knew I liked it. What a great opening line: “April is the cruelest month.” I even wrote a paper on it in high school – not that I understood it, but I was trying.

As far as Eliot and his first wife go, it’s hard to say. There’s an argument to be made – and it’s made here – that it was Eliot who drove her crazy. There is certainly an argument to be made that he was pretty troubled himself. That article I just linked – even if it is in The New Yorker – is pretty interesting, by the way.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20-percent-of-the-usafs-b-2-force-is-deployed-down-under