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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 4, 2022: The American-born Nobel Prize winning poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) published his famous poem The Waste Land in 1922. The Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941) also published his famous novel Ulysses in 1922.
The Second Norton Critical Edition of T. S. Eliot: "The Waste Land" and Other Poems: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Michael North of UCLA was published in 2022 by W. W. Norton to commemorate the publication of Eliot's most famous poem in 1922. The first edition was published in 2001.
North is the author of the 1991 book The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge University Press) and the 1994 book The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (Oxford University Press).
Of course, anyone who is interested may buy a Norton Critical Edition. However, Norton Critical Editions are used primarily by college students, for whom they are the required texts in literature courses.
In the Second Norton Critical Edition, Eliot's poem The Waste Land appears on pages 43 to 66 -- ably annotated by North in the footnotes (pp. 43-60) and in the "Notes" (pp. 61-66).
Basically, The Waste Land is a poem expressing what the Spanish Renaissance mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order, refers to as desolation in his famous Spiritual Exercises. The Victorian Jesuit poet and classicist Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) wrote some famous sonnets that literary critics refer to as sonnets of desolation. For a discussion of Hopkins' sonnets of desolation, see the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong's 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, pp. 62 and 145-159), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
Ah, but if you are not feeling a strong sense of desolation at the present time, why in the world would you want to read a poem expressing a strong sense of desolation? That's a good question.
However, in the case of Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land, perhaps you do not need to have ever experienced a strong sense of desolation to find the experience of reading it rewarding for other reasons than to commiserate with its strong sense of desolation. Ah, but what other reasons might there be for reading it, eh?
In the 2015 book Cynic Satire (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), the late Eric McLuhan (1942-2018; Ph.D. in English, University of Dallas, 1982), the eldest son of Marshall and Corinne McLuhan, he uses the terms cynic satire and Menippean satire interchangeably. Dr. Eric McLuhan suggests that Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land is a Menippean satire (pp. 196-197, 213 (including note 224), and 230).
Dr. Eric McLuhan also suggests that James Joyce's 1939 experimental novel Finnegans Wake is a Menippean satire in his 1997 book The Role of Thunder in "Finnegans Wake" (University of Toronto Press).
In Dr. Eric McLuhan's 2015 book Cynic Satire, he differentiates Menippean satire from both Juvenalian satire, on the one hand, and, on the other, Horatian satire. In his view, the distinguishing hallmark of Menippean satire is that it is designed to attack the reader. But he claims that this is not the case with either Juvenalian satire or Horatian satire.
According to him, "Horace's great contribution [to satire] was to discover how to treat common things with dignity and poise, setting aside crude and barbarous forms of attack" (p. 182). But Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land does not "sustain an urbane and civilized style and tone that is smooth and even" (p. 182).
By contrast, according to Dr. Eric McLuhan, Juvenalian satire "[b]roadcasts the high dudgeon and the righteous moral code [and] applies the verbal lash, to drive out wickedness and sin [and it] brings back idealism and rectitude" (p. 183). These descriptors of Juvenalian satire do not fit Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land.
So by Dr. Eric McLuhan's standard for Menippean satire, both Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land and Joyce's 1939 experimental novel Finnegans Wake are deliberately designed by their respective authors to attack their readers, because each work "Enhances play and wit in all forms and by all available means" and "Shuns good taste as a refuge of the witless, sets aside moralizing as an approach" and "Carrie[s] to its logical conclusion, low-and-motley satire turn[ed] into serious art" - serious art that "Plays with and attunes the reader response; loosens up the reflexes to promote balance and play among the faculties, cure up-tight robotism and self-importance, restore [the] sense of human scale, [and] proportion" - all by attacking the reader! (p. 184).
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