1 - A ‘Dangerous Model’: Resisting The Waste Land

Summary

The Waste Land in Britain

In Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’, Lawrence Rainey reminds us of the marked difference in the reception of The Waste Land between Britain and the United States:

Because the poem was first published there (without the notes) in the Criterion, a new journal struggling to find an audience, and then eleven months later was issued in the Hogarth Press edition that was limited to 460 copies, it received very little media attention [in Britain]: three reviews in the wake of the Criterion publication, a further six after the Hogarth edition – and all but one of the nine were hostile. In the United States, in contrast, there were more than fifty reviews and notices of the poem, more or less equally divided between negative and positive evaluations.

The difference is surprisingly rarely noted in studies of Eliot's poem. Surveys of the reception history tend to highlight the more positive American reviews, several of which were by names we recognise from the history of modernism – Edmund Wilson, Gilbert Seldes, Conrad Aiken, Harriet Monroe, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate – and to focus discussion of the British reception on the slightly later, highly influential, positive criticism by I.A. Richards, in the Appendix to the second edition of Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), and F.R. Leavis, in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). This approach is effective in making clear the poem's relevance to the institutionalising of modernism, and indeed the discipline of English more generally, achieved by the American New Critics and scholar-critics based at the University of Cambridge, and it underlines the continuities between the two. But it can suggest that there was a kind of inevitability to The Waste Land's status as the modernist poem par excellence. What is lost in this account is the considerable resistance to the poem demonstrated by British poets and critics. The Waste Land was not the only model for the modern poem.

Critics including Chris Baldick and Peter Howarth have demonstrated how ‘the legend of heroic modernist insurrection’ has obscured the extent to which pre-war poets, notably but not only the Georgian poets, continued to be widely published and enthusiastically read during the 1920s and 1930s.