LEADER
Rosemary Gould lives in Virginia with her husband and three young adult children. She has been leading seminars for Classical Pursuits for about 15 years, and says she takes inspiration from the deep intelligence of her seminar participants, the Shared Inquiry method, and from poetry. In the seminar, again and again, a kind of inner alchemy happens, which she believes is what poetry is meant to do for us. Few poems have had more of that transformative power than “The Waste Land.”
BOOKS
The Waste Land and Other Writings by T. S. Eliot, introduction by Mary Karr
(Modern Library, 2002)
ISBN-13: 978-0375759345
SEMINAR OVERVIEW
“Romantic poetry and the genteel Victorian stuff after it didn’t just dissolve. It came down with an axe swoop and the blade was T. S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land.'” –Mary Karr (from the introduction)
T. S. Eliot is perhaps the most famously difficult poet in the English language, the one who invented poetry that is so opaque many people complain that it is meaningless. And yet Eliot’s masterpiece, “The Waste Land,” which we will read closely over the course of the week, has had an immense influence on culture. Its disturbingly chaotic form and bleak storytelling somehow brought forth a new kind of poetic beauty that haunted readers even though they didn’t understand it. After the devastating experiences of WWI, the poem spoke to them more powerfully than the lovely rhyme and meter of even the recent past. A century later, “Waste Land” remains surprisingly effective and mysterious, as all great poems do, and its attempt to make “fragments” of the European tradition psychologically sustaining continues to be controversial today.
As a companion piece that may shed light on the poem, we will also study Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” (c. 1919) a different kind of masterpiece which influenced generations of poets and literary critics and even the Shared Inquiry method itself. In the essay, Eliot maps out his vision of the poet’s role as a renovator of language, arguing also that the poet’s life and personality should not be the subject of the work. Eliot’s philosophy will help us to explore what he thought was valuable about poetry and what he hoped to achieve.
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