T S Eliot's poem The Wasteland is now considerd highly overrated. is this true and why?

Question

A friend said this poem was the frenzied product of a man in the throe oF a neurosis and edited by an equally neurotic or crazzy poet( Exra Pound? True?

Answer 1

Considered overrated by whom? Who is your friend? Comments like this don't reveal anything about two major poets (TS Eliot and EZRA Pound) but show how far the dumbing down of Western culture has gone. The wasteland, indeed.

Answer 2

It's Ezra Pound - I can't really comment on whether the poem is over rated because when I tried to read it I gave up after one stanza - I was doing a degree in English Literature so I do love poetry - but just can't get into the modernist poets such as Eliot and Pound. Maybe not being able to finish it speaks for itself about whether it is good or not - all objective though of course - if you want to read some modernist poetry I would recommend W H Auden who was a contemporary of Eliot's.

Answer 3

In part. Eliot and Pound were two of the century's greatest poets, but both had a bucketful of problems (rent the movie TOM AND VIV and you'll never think of Eliot as a nice guy again; Pound spent time in an asylum after WWII). As for the poem itself, it was one of the most influential works of the century, but some critics argue that it's too clever for its own good, using classical and other references that only a highly-educated person would understand. Same goes for Joyce's ULYSSES and FINNEGAN'S WAKE, which can only be read with guidebooks.

Answer 4

The Wasteland is highly over rated because it was written on paper which is very wasteful and causes the destruction of trees. Eliot should have used a word processor which are less wasteful although I heard they were only invented in 1932 so at the least a typewriter should have been used and saved onto floppy disc.
Also I consider it very wasteful to put your wife in a mental hospital. If Eliot was so clever he could have put her to work somewhere which would have increased his earnings considerably since no one bought his poems cos of the fact that they were useless.

Answer 5

I'm no fan of Eliot, and while I would not say that he is overrated, I'd say that he engages in hyper-intellectualism and that I have no patience with such writing. It's a personal thing, mostly.

However, he had inspired many, many fantastic writers in the process. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot would be one example, and even F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporates images of the Wasteland into his text "The Great Gatsby".

So, I would be hesitant to deny the value of Eliot's poetry because without his work, there would have been no Gatsby nor Waiting for Godot.

Answer 6

T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, two of the most over rated poets ever, it s a complete mystery why these two frauds are regarded by so many as leading lights of modernist poetry. Eliot is a boring poser and Pound a plagiarist non talent, they are both prime examples of how mediocrity in the modern arts is taken up by intellectual masturbators.

Answer 7

Despite some questions about the racial views of both Eliot and Pound, the work of both poets is counted among the greatest accomplishments of Modernist literature, to be counted along with giants like Joyce, Proust, and others. Whether or not one personally likes his poetry is just that: one person's opinion. As a sidenote, its not true that one necessarily needs a guidebook to read either; Pound and Eliot knew multiple languages and like Joyce were literary geniuses and none needed a guidebook to write his work. If one is literate to an extent one will understand any of these writers, it's just that we are no longer schooled in the classics, or Latin, or Greek, like the writers of their generation were. If someone feels inadequately educated to understand their work, they should stop whining and start educating themselves!

Answer 8

Neurosis is a valid human condition and so if this is your friends argument for as to why it is over rated then the same must apply to most of the great writers. 'The Wasteland' is an interesting comment on society and i think its genius lies in the fact that it is not wholly coherent and linear which is an accurate depiction of any society if you ask me.

Answer 9

No, it is a ground breaking poem. Though much more credit should go to Ezra Pound who polished and edited the original, and much longer, manuscript. It still remains one of the very greatest poems of the 20th century.

Answer 10

Its slightly worrying that after years of holding 'Wasteland' in the highest esteem, the experts are now telling us it is less than they believed. A sad indictment of today (and of art in general) is that we often sit around waiting to be told what to like and what not to like (and what it is art and what is Tracy Emin). Poetry and the enjoyment thereof must be left to the reader and the 'classicalization' or 'demonization' of the arts should be left to the pompous oafs who 'know best'.