Disciplining 'The Waste Land', or how to lead critics into temptation

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Jo Ellen Green Kaiser

What is the use of explaining 'laquearia' by quoting two lines of Latin containing the word, which will convey nothing to those who do not know that language, and nothing new to those who do? What is the use of giving a quotation from Ovid which begins in the middle of a sentence, without reference? And when one person hails another on London Bridge as having been with him 'at Mylae,' how is the non-classical reader to guess that this is the name of a Punic sea-fight in which a Phoenician sailor, presumably, the speaker, had taken part? (117)

Lucas quite rightly perceives that many of the notes (especially those beginning "Cf." [compare with] or "V" [see]) have the form of philological citations, but then do not deliver the appropriate scholarly information. References that would be obvious to most educated readers of Eliot's day, like the parodied lines from Marvell, are noted, while quite obscure references to Joyce, Lyly, and Kipling, among others, are omitted.(11) References to a given author and work are noted in one place, yet not in another; for example, references to Shakespeare's Tempest are noted for lines 192 and 257, but not for lines 48 and 125. Sources for passages in foreign or classical languages are given in those languages, which is hardly helpful for the person who does not have enough learning to recognize the passage in the first place. Obscure references to classical or historical situations are not noted, yet Eliot will take pains to describe the origins of a common ballad or the species of singing bird he has in mind. Finally, Eliot at times seems to mislead the reader deliberately, as in line 360, where he sends the reader off to investigate a "delusion" by one member of an Antarctic expedition "that there was one more member than could actually be counted," rather than noting the more relevant New Testament passages describing the journey to Emmaus. In short, these notes certainly do not fulfill the philological imperative of giving readers "all the references for my quotations."

At the same time, the notes hardly satisfy the expectations for impressionism that they also raise. A paradigmatic example of an impressionistic note comes at line 68, where the speaker, instead of citing the apocryphal tale in which Christ's crucifixion is said to have occurred on "the final stroke of nine," informs us that this sound was "a phenomenon which I have often noticed." Other references to the speaker's experience rather than to a textual source occur in the notes to lines 199, 210, 221, 264, and 360 (the hermit-thrush note arguably includes aspects of both philological and impressionistic discourse). In each of these cases, any source the author might mention is given not as a reference but as an impression of his experience, and thus an indication of its aesthetic value. The problem with these notes, and the source of their parodic quality, is that they ultimately refuse to give us access to the author. The impressionistic critic longs for biography - such as Coleridge's account of taking opium before writing "Kubla Khan" - yet the potentially biographical nature of these notes is itself too fragmented to be of much use. Tellingly, while Eliot's biographers have found a rich vein of material in the drafts to The Waste Land, they have, for the most part, left the notes to the poem alone.