The First Eighteen Lines of The Waste Land
Illustration by Tyler Varsell
THIS CENTENNIAL OCCASION encourages me to begin with a quotation from William Empson’s commentary on some excised passages from The Waste Land: “Half the time,” writes Empson in Using Biography, “when the impressionable English were saying how wonderfully courageous and original he was to come out with some crashingly reactionary remark, he was just saying what any decent man would say back home in St. Louis.” Empson was trying to face, though not quite squarely, the bedeviling topic of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which I must leave for another time. At this time I want to address only the first eighteen lines of the first section of The Waste Land, the opening of “The Burial of the Dead.” April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
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