I wrote my dissertation on The Waste Land and got lost down rabbit holes of literary allusion and the obscure. Reading it in such a way will make you feel smart. Allows you to intellectualise sorrow, perhaps escaping the need to feel it.

I recently reread it and I feel that literary criticism has done it an injustice. You do not need to understand the metaphysics or literary references, it can be enjoyed, as a beautiful melancholy lament and then revelation on the human spirit’s ability to regenerate.

Literary elitism guards it from wider appreciation. Eliot uses allusion to distance himself from the emotions he is feeling but also capture them. They still bleed through the bandages and can be felt. Perhaps more truly. We do not need to understand Shakespeare’s views on Plato to appreciate Tomorrow and tomorrow from Macbeth or To be or not to be from Hamlet.

I think I will spend April reading and taking about The Waste Land, as April is the cruellest month.

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