conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled The Waste Land and Other Poems about Berrigan-esque, Sonnets, Morpheus with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Poetry?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Few things are sacred, few places are safe, and few poets can convey the unsettling burden of their responsibility as engagingly as the author - the rare poet who strives (in the Berrigan-esque Sonnets to Morpheus) to prove 'I'm more than the sum of my mirrors,' and somehow succeeds. --The Boston Globe
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Waste Land and Other Poems
  The notes to lines 218 and 412 seem to be tremendously important keys to the poem, in terms of explaining how readers may resolve the confusing medley of perspectives and consciousness (Tiresias is 'the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest,' Eliot writes in his note to line 218, and his comment at line 412 gives a brief but incisive explanation of how Bradleyan philosophy—the subject of his dissertation—informs the sensory experience of the poem). The references to various sources show how intertextually Eliot composed, and how he wants us to read; several notes reference other passages in the poem, giving a sense of its internal connections and letting readers know that it is important to make these kind of associations—to remember what has gone on before, and how we might organize and categorize the array of images and themes that the poem presents.
  Pound added only two words to the poem: 'demobbed' (short for 'demobilized'—sent home from the war) and 'demotic' ('common, popular, vulgar'): Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, unshaven, 'Asked me in demotic French' to a possibly sordid luncheon and then a weekend at the Metropole. Mainly Pound challenged and bolstered Eliot's voice; he queried and cut. He edited the poem as if he were editing a film (cognizant that, in the 1920s, film was emerging as a bold and powerful new medium that was perhaps uniquely qualified to capture the modern temperament) : relegating large, ineffective passages to the cutting-room floor; heightening a sense of sensory immediacy and direct visual intensity; linking and juxtaposing scenes with quick, startling cuts. He identified passages he found especially effective, such as the second verse paragraph of part III, by scrawling 'echt' (meaning veritable, real) in the margin, and worked to lift the entire manuscript up to that standard. Pound chided Eliot when he used the word 'perhaps': 'Dam per'apsez,' he wrote in his idiosyncratic phonetic diction. He knew that this poem needed to resonate with clear, crisp certainties, not equivocation. And again, when Eliot wrote what is now line 251 ('Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass') in a less definitive mode ('Across her brain one half-formed thought may pass') Pound responded, 'make up yr. mind.' Pound nurtured the poem's clear, definitive voice, which he educed from a much more tentative draft—and Eliot's initial hesitations and uncertainties are completely understandable considering his tenuous mental and emotional condition during the first stage of composition.
  Pound had also a strong sense of what the poem's style and meter should look like: its distinctive, hard, harsh sound and prosody emerged out of an earlier version that was more muddled and varied in style. 'Too loose,' he wrote by one passage, and 'rhyme drags it out to diffuseness' in another (both of which were cut: Eliot followed Pound's suggestions faithfully).
  There was one other person besides Pound who helped to shape the poem: In the margin of the draft, Eliot's first wife, Vivien, wrote one phrase that appears in the final poem (slightly modified) as line 164: She placed an asterisk in the margin next to the passage about Lil and Albert and then wrote at the bottom of the page: 'What you get married for if you don't want to have children?' This line is central to the poem in so many ways: Barrenness and the danger of a so ciety's failure or inability to perpetuate itself in a harsh, hostile world is a prominent theme. Line 164 suggests that perhaps this failure is volitional: Are people actively choosing not to have children? Is there something about modern marriage and sexual-emotional relationships that is so dysfunctionally noncommunicative as to forestall reproduction? (Think of all the miscues and retreats in 'Prufrock,' and 'Portrait of a Lady,' and 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night,' and the sexual torpor, or terror, or inertia, of the Sweeney poems and 'Hysteria' and 'Lune de Miel.')
  Marriage and childbearing evoke the fusion (or here, the disjunction) between the social and the biological aspects of the most fundamental unit of society, the family. As Lil awaits her husband Albert's return from the military and cultural devastation of the Great War, her friends in a pub discuss her readiness (or unreadiness) for the reunion. She needs to make herself a bit smart—the years have taken a toll on her (and certainly they must have on him as well): Will they be attractive to each other? Or will they recoil from the horror of their appearances? Will they endure as a couple, or will the anticipated sexual disjunction propel him into the arms of another woman? Will they have more children, or would it kill her to go through childbirth again? Does she want children, or would she abort a future pregnancy as she did her previous one? Has her life made her infertile? How do one's personal, sexual, romantic drives weather the zeitgeist of the modern, postwar world? What and whom can one cling to? What can one expect for the future ? All these questions resonate from Vivien's line.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There was one other person besides Pound who helped to shape the poem: In the margin of the draft, Eliot's first wife, Vivien, wrote one phrase that appears in the final poem (slightly modified) as line 164: She placed an asterisk in the margin next to the passage about Lil and Albert and then wrote at the bottom of the page: 'What you get married for if you don't want to have children?' This line is central to the poem in so many ways: Barrenness and the danger of a so ciety's failure or inability to perpetuate itself in a harsh, hostile world is a prominent theme. Line 164 suggests that perhaps this failure is volitional: Are people actively choosing not to have children? Is there something about modern marriage and sexual-emotional relationships that is so dysfunctionally noncommunicative as to forestall reproduction? (Think of all the miscues and retreats in 'Prufrock,' and 'Portrait of a Lady,' and 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night,' and the sexual torpor, or terror, or inertia, of the Sweeney poems and 'Hysteria' and 'Lune de Miel.')
  Marriage and childbearing evoke the fusion (or here, the disjunction) between the social and the biological aspects of the most fundamental unit of society, the family. As Lil awaits her husband Albert's return from the military and cultural devastation of the Great War, her friends in a pub discuss her readiness (or unreadiness) for the reunion. She needs to make herself a bit smart—the years have taken a toll on her (and certainly they must have on him as well): Will they be attractive to each other? Or will they recoil from the horror of their appearances? Will they endure as a couple, or will the anticipated sexual disjunction propel him into the arms of another woman? Will they have more children, or would it kill her to go through childbirth again? Does she want children, or would she abort a future pregnancy as she did her previous one? Has her life made her infertile? How do one's personal, sexual, romantic drives weather the zeitgeist of the modern, postwar world? What and whom can one cling to? What can one expect for the future ? All these questions resonate from Vivien's line.
  First of all, the language is less complex, and less unstable, than anywhere else in the poem. No foreign intertexts, no erudite allusions, no insane or bawdy interjections. The words are simple and calm. The rhetoric is, one might say, philosophical—logical—in a very concrete way: if-then constructions; clear assertions of reality and perception and presence/absence. The narrative expounds, in fairly graspable terms, a quest-object, and it is, simply enough, merely water: the force of life, the basic yet astounding compound that covers most of the earth. To paraphrase bluntly the tragedy of modern life, as Eliot formulates it in this passage: There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.
  This seems ominous, unpromising. But there is also, in this passage, one glimmer of hope: 'If there were the sound of water only,' Eliot writes in line 3 5 3. The sound of water would obviously not be real water, but it might remind us of water, or inspire us to hold out hope until the water comes. And indeed the poem delivers on this hypothetical proposition just five lines later: 'Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop.' The line is probably the poem's simplest, perhaps its most banal, yet it is also its most fulfilling. Eliot and all the various and sundry cultural forces he summons throughout the poem cannot elsewhere complete or fulfill the gaps, the lacunae... but here, Eliot shows a kind of aesthetic power: If water cannot be had, then at least a poet with his tools (sounds!) can deliver an avatar of water. Lurking here is the suggestion, which one might not have expected given the cynicism about the potential of art elsewhere in the poem, that poetry can, in fact, endure and provide (or point the way toward) salvation.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lurking here is the suggestion, which one might not have expected given the cynicism about the potential of art elsewhere in the poem, that poetry can, in fact, endure and provide (or point the way toward) salvation. Line 164 suggests that perhaps this failure is volitional: Are people actively choosing not to have children? Is there something about modern marriage and sexual-emotional relationships that is so dysfunctionally noncommunicative as to forestall reproduction? (Think of all the miscues and retreats in 'Prufrock,' and 'Portrait of a Lady,' and 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night,' and the sexual torpor, or terror, or inertia, of the Sweeney poems and 'Hysteria' and 'Lune de Miel.')
  Marriage and childbearing evoke the fusion (or here, the disjunction) between the social and the biological aspects of the most fundamental unit of society, the family. As Lil awaits her husband Albert's return from the military and cultural devastation of the Great War, her friends in a pub discuss her readiness (or unreadiness) for the reunion. She needs to make herself a bit smart—the years have taken a toll on her (and certainly they must have on him as well): Will they be attractive to each other? Or will they recoil from the horror of their appearances? Will they endure as a couple, or will the anticipated sexual disjunction propel him into the arms of another woman? Will they have more children, or would it kill her to go through childbirth again? Does she want children, or would she abort a future pregnancy as she did her previous one? Has her life made her infertile? How do one's personal, sexual, romantic drives weather the zeitgeist of the modern, postwar world? What and whom can one cling to? What can one expect for the future ? All these questions resonate from Vivien's line.
  First of all, the language is less complex, and less unstable, than anywhere else in the poem. No foreign intertexts, no erudite allusions, no insane or bawdy interjections. The words are simple and calm. The rhetoric is, one might say, philosophical—logical—in a very concrete way: if-then constructions; clear assertions of reality and perception and presence/absence. The narrative expounds, in fairly graspable terms, a quest-object, and it is, simply enough, merely water: the force of life, the basic yet astounding compound that covers most of the earth. To paraphrase bluntly the tragedy of modern life, as Eliot formulates it in this passage: There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.
  This seems ominous, unpromising. But there is also, in this passage, one glimmer of hope: 'If there were the sound of water only,' Eliot writes in line 3 5 3. The sound of water would obviously not be real water, but it might remind us of water, or inspire us to hold out hope until the water comes. And indeed the poem delivers on this hypothetical proposition just five lines later: 'Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop.' The line is probably the poem's simplest, perhaps its most banal, yet it is also its most fulfilling. Eliot and all the various and sundry cultural forces he summons throughout the poem cannot elsewhere complete or fulfill the gaps, the lacunae... but here, Eliot shows a kind of aesthetic power: If water cannot be had, then at least a poet with his tools (sounds!) can deliver an avatar of water.There was one other person besides Pound who helped to shape the poem: In the margin of the draft, Eliot's first wife, Vivien, wrote one phrase that appears in the final poem (slightly modified) as line 164: She placed an asterisk in the margin next to the passage about Lil and Albert and then wrote at the bottom of the page: 'What you get married for if you don't want to have children?' This line is central to the poem in so many ways: Barrenness and the danger of a so ciety's failure or inability to perpetuate itself in a harsh, hostile world is a prominent theme.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last two paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In 'The Waste Land,' Mr. Eliot's sense of the literary past has become so overmastering as almost to constitute the motive of the work. It is as if, in conjunction with Mr. Pound of the 'Cantos,' he wanted to make a 'literature of literature'—a poetry not more actuated by life itself than by poetry.
  Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences. We are both poets and we both like to play. That's the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He likes to play Eucharist. Eliot's sense of the literary past has become so overmastering as almost to constitute the motive of the work. It is as if, in conjunction with Mr. Pound of the 'Cantos,' he wanted to make a 'literature of literature'—a poetry not more actuated by life itself than by poetry.
  Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences. We are both poets and we both like to play. That's the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre.In 'The Waste Land,' Mr.