“The Waste Land” at 101

How is T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece holding up these days?

The first essay in Cynthia Ozick’s Fame and Folly is ‘T.S. Eliot at 101’, originally published in 1989. It’s a clear-eyed examination of the poet and his meteoric rise and fall in the literary world in the early and mid 20th century.

I like to think that Ozick published her essay on Eliot’s 101st birthday, rather than his 100th, for the same reason that I am publishing this essay on the 101st anniversary of “The Waste Land” — she missed her deadline.

Whether that’s the case or not, in the tradition of the inimitable Ozick, I want to take a look at where ‘The Waste Land’ stands as it turns 101 this year.

In 2022, the centenary of the poem’s publication was met with plenty of fanfare and the requisite publishing of new books, criticism, retrospectives, etc. etc. In England — the country Eliot is still most associated with, at least in spirit — celebration of the poem included a six-day festival of readings held throughout London.

It also included an article by Anthony Lane that appeared in The New Yorker, titled “The Shock and Aftershocks of ‘The Waste Land’”. For the 100th anniversary of the poem, Lane examines where it stands currently in our cultural milieu, and finds it to be as relevant as ever. The poem, he states, “has never stopped sounding…