Unlike the blogger who said that he was pissed at buying a book he wouldn’t even read a quarter off, I wasn’t “pissed” at all. It’s one more book for me to add to my home library. I love it when someone comes, glances admiringly at all my books and comments on how well-read I must be. To be fair though, I have read most of the books that I own!
Anyway, while “The Waste Land” isn’t as hard to read as Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals,” I had a hard time with it at first. It seemed like a poem that had no meaning (which, I know, is far from the truth). I read the poem for its imagery, and it did paint a “waste land.” It’s one of those depressing poems which you read, your head gets filled with sad imagery, and you have no idea what it’s about. That’s what happened to me the first time I read it. Hopefully the evening lecture will enlighten me! To get the full poem, I think we’d have to read the works the poem alludes to. But quite honestly, who has the time for that?
This is probably the shortest blog post I have ever written to date, but that’s because I didn’t fully grasp the poem. I’m going to wait and see how the magnificent Kevin McNeilly can illuminate this poem.
