This concludes an effort to compile a more comprehensive set of notes on The Waste Land than I had seen elsewhere. What initially started with scribbles in the margin gradually grew into an attempt to gain a better understanding of this poem for myself, and then it progressed into something that I hope is worth sharing. I truly do hope that you, lecteur, might even do what I have done: add your own margin notes, read Eliot’s comments, allow for the allusions, consider what others have discovered and find out things for yourself.
There is always more to it that a progression of curiosity, of course. I have already indicated some of my guides (see the Foreword) and indexed the sources and reflections, but I want to more properly acknowledge some of the help behind the help. First, I am most grateful to my modern library through the internet and to its prominent tools of Google and Wikipedia, which led me to many layers of discoveries. Through these, I had rich availability of the public domain works of Shakespeare, Dante, Ovid and many others. I am also grateful for the general impetus given me by other online annotation efforts, most notably http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com, author/editor surprisingly not named; http://rapgenius.com/ Ts-eliot-the-waste-land-lyrics#lyric, © 2012 Genius Media Group; and http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/ poems/waste-land#9,© Ian Lancashire (Toronto-St. George), General Editor. And again, I appreciate the work of each one of the escorts acknowledged in the Foreword, all of whom were first introduced to me through the internet. In the course of my browsing I will admit to stumbling across some material that I have not properly credited, and I am proud to have discovered a few allusions completely on my own, but for both the stumbling and discovering I am indebted to my internet library in general.
I still prefer paper, though, and keeping physical books on hand to read and carry with me has been invaluable. It was good to have old copies of Hamlet and The Tempest and The Inferno on the shelf, but I also made a point of purchasing Henry Wordsworth Longfellow’s translation of The Inferno, notwithstanding its availability online. There is something more intimate about turning pages. I was also happy to add a few newer hardcopy escorts to my collection. I am especially grateful for Randy Malamud’s introduction and notes in the Barnes & Noble Classic edition of The Waste Land and Other Poems, T.S. Eliot (copyright © 2005 by Randy Malamud and Barnes & Noble Inc.); the notes and essays in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition, copyright © 2003 by W. W. Norton & Company Inc.; and The Annotated Wasteland with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Rainey.
Besides the literary sources, a heartfelt thank you goes to my brothers Dan and Josh. To Dan, yet again, for his encouraging me to keep at this and all things literate; by his positive words I was moved to effectively quadruple the volume of what I had first shown him. And to Josh, for his general inspirations and “Peace” wishing, but more specifically for his last-round proofing assistance. Thank you, too, to everyone at the Stillwater Symposia, to whom I have written a special postscript.
Finally, I must specifically acknowledge what started me on these efforts in the first place, before I had ever earnestly read The Waste Land: a first reading of Eliot’s Little Gidding in his Four Quartets (1943), with the footnotes in my Norton Anthology telling me to compare this poem to the Fire Sermon in The Waste Land. Thus the power of notes!
--- Jonathan Vold
