Is “The Waste Land” Accurate?

Can a world with goldfish ponds, like this one in Rockefeller Park, Manhattan, really be a meaningless waste land? Maybe.

HOBOKEN, NOVEMBER 24, 2025.  Recently, not sure why, or maybe for obvious reasons, I re-read “The Waste Land.” I was curious: How does it hold up? Dated, dead on, what?

When I first read it, I was an alienated teen, but the poem brought out the Pollyanna in me. I thought: Come on, T.S., things aren’t that bad, tulips are pretty, sex is fun (so I hear).

“The Waste Land” struck me as self-contradicting. If you really think things are this shitty, why labor so mightily to say so? Why not just stick your head in an oven or drink yourself to death? That was my take 50+ years ago.

I try to read the poem with an open mind now, as if for the first time, but that’s hard, the images are so familiar: dried tubers, stony rubbish, dead trees, fear in a handful of dust, slimy-bellied rats scuttling past bones, yada yada. “The Waste Land” is one long howl of despair--although not as long as I remember, and more grumble-groan than howl.

But almost against my will, “The Waste Land” entrances me. Far from dated, it seems somehow ancient—it’s hard to imagine a time when it didn’t exist--and eerily current. Published in 1922, in the aftermath of the First World War, the poem portends the Second World War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, MAD, the boob tube, 9/11--not to mention the rapacious capitalism and crass cruelty of our AI-addled era.

Eliot’s cryptic allusions to history, art, scripture, myth seem less show-offy to me now, they make more sense. Eliot invokes the real and imagined past to underscore the tawdriness of the present.

“The Waste Land” is cacophonous, veering between voices, styles, languages, and yet the pieces come together in a dirge of somber, majestic beauty, which casts an incantatory spell. The poem reminds me of the funeral march in Beethoven’s Eroica and of Dylan’s “Hard Rain.”

Is the beauty enough? To be more specific: If life is really as vacuous as “The Waste Land” says, can “The Waste Land” or any art redeem it?

Hell, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the beauty of this ode to emptiness that’s redeeming. Maybe it’s Eliot’s ability to say what he sees, and our ability to hear him. Maybe that is redeeming, the human capacity for truth, no matter how terrible.

But that brings me back to the question: Is Eliot’s vision accurate? I’m tempted to say yes when I contemplate the arrogant apes running things now. They’d be hilarious if they weren’t spying on, imprisoning and killing people.

Eliot’s perspective is impaired in one crucial way: he’s a snob. This is his worst flaw. Worse, you ask, than his antisemitism? Well, I see the antisemitism as a manifestation of the snobbery.

In one passage of “The Waste Land,” a young woman, a “typist,” gets it on with a “carbuncular” clerk. The mere thought of working-class kids fucking makes Eliot wrinkle his nose and murmur, Ick. And the clerk has zits! Gross!

I prefer how The Beatles portray blue-collar desire in “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid” or “When I’m 64.” The Beatles mock their subjects, but gently, fondly, they don’t sneer.

Same with Eliot’s contemporary, Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce calls upon mythology not to put his characters down, as Eliot does, but to uplift them. Randy ad salesman and cuckhold Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin fretting over sex, food, money, death. Bloom is a comical figure, but he’s heroic, too, courageous, clever, loving.

And yet “The Waste Land,” despite the whiff of elitism, moves me. Like all great art, Eliot’s poem makes you wonder: What’s art for? What’s the point? My answer: Art dispels our habituation, it rips the film off our eyes, it makes us pay attention. Other than that, no rules, anything goes.

Art can make us see beauty in banality, but it can also do the opposite. In “The Waste Land,” banality is the ground of being, and the banality isn’t demonic, crackling with manic energy, as in a Lynch film or Pynchon novel. It’s devoid of meaning, which makes it all the more soul-crushing.

The narrator of “The Waste Land” mutters:

I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Yeah, we’re undead, zombies, each of us trapped in a solipsistic cell. “The Waste Land” devolves at the end into incoherence, madness. Eliot’s center cannot hold. Here’s the poem’s final line:

Shantih shantih shantih

“Shantih” is Sanskrit for “peace,” the peace not of nirvana but of the grave. I imagine someone chanting that final line while throwing dirt on a coffin, it’s the equivalent of “dust to dust.” We crawl from oblivion to oblivion.

Eliot was steeped in knowledge of cultures old and modern, west and east, secular and religious. What good is all that erudition if it cannot save you? Console you? At least “The Waste Land” made Eliot famous. Success, I’m guessing, eased his pain, helped his center hold. But what about the rest of us?

When my students write papers about problems—collateral damage from industrial fishing; the troubles of Kashmir; the epidemic of loneliness, which compels some souls to turn to chatbots for companionship—I urge them to propose solutions.

“The Waste Land” says life sucks then you die. Eliot doesn’t propose solutions to this problem, nor would I expect him to. The poet’s job is to show us what he sees. Period. But we readers can react to Eliot’s vision in various ways:

1.        We can dismiss Eliot as a condescending, over-educated prick who projects his depression onto the world.

2.        We can read “The Waste Land” not as a description but as a prediction, or warning: This is our fate unless we do something to avert it.

3.        A grimmer take: The poem is a death sentence, a diagnosis of terminal illness, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re doomed, we might as well get drunk and have meaningless sex.

4.        The grimmest take: We’re not doomed, because we’re already dead. Or un-dead. We just don’t know it, because we’re zombies, flesh-and-blood instantiations of ChatGPT.

My take on “The Waste Land” depends on my mood, which has been volatile lately. On good days I waver between options 1 and 2. I reject Eliot’s despair as a cheap thrill. I tell myself I’m not a zombie, I’m a conscious human being with thoughts and feelings and free will.

Yes, the world is a mess right now, but if we can move past mindless militarism, capitalism and consumerism, things will get better. Meanwhile, tulips are pretty, and sex is fun, especially with someone you love.

On bad days I feel like a snarl of algorithms with no free will running on an aging brain. On these days, “The Waste Land” rings too true, it seems dead on. An alternative opening pops into my head:

November is the cruelest month, when

a young Muslim socialist breeds hope

that we live in a democracy.

Further Reading:

More riffs on literature: What’s Poetry’s Point? A Riff on “Paterson”, Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag and Free Will, Surfing Woolf’s “The Waves”, Woolf Versus Buddha, I Read Gravity’s Rainbow So You Don’t Have To, Is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” Really, Like, Great?, My Bloomsday Tribute to James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever, Henry James, The Ambassadors and the Dithering Hero, The Golden Bowl and the Combinatorial Explosion of Theories of Mind, Free Will, War and the Tolstoy Paradox, Moby Dick and Hawking’s “Ultimate Theory”, Jack London, Liberal Arts and the Dream of Total Knowledge.