Poetry

This wing opens with a war and a voyage home, and it has been downhill for armies and uphill for readers ever since. I will be blunt about The Waste Land: Eliot appended footnotes to a poem about civilization collapsing, and the footnotes are part of the ruin. Read it anyway. Ovid is in here changing bodies into trees and gods into weather. Rumi is in here being quoted at weddings by people who have never read him; repair that. Poetry is the one shelf where slowness is the point: a page a night is a fast pace, and nothing else in the library gives back this much per line.

The middle third asks for patience. Reviewers describe “hundreds of pages of them being hacked, cleaved and skewered to death,” war-book violence that repeats without much variation. Minor soldiers arrive and die within pages of each other, so “many deaths happened to seemingly throwaway characters, barely introduced,” and the roster blurs into “pages that blend together in a stream of similar-sounding Greek men.” The Catalogue of Ships near the start is the passage most readers admit to skimming. Even fans of Lattimore's fidelity note “wholesale repetition of phrases,” the formulaic epithets that reflect Homer's oral roots but read as padding to modern eyes. Some readers report the book stretching across months rather than weeks.

— against The Iliad

The density of sexual violence is the sticking point most readers name, one counting roughly 50 incidents of rape or attempted rape across the poem; by the later books it numbs more than it shocks. At least one reader stopped around the halfway mark, citing “too much depravity and immorality for me” as reason enough to quit. The genealogical catalogs and rapid-fire cast make it easy to lose track of who's who without stopping to check notes. Translation choices split the complaints further: older, ornate versions wear thin over hundreds of pages, while newer ones catch the opposite charge, a critic calling one edition's jokes “cutesiness raised to the highest power” and another reader saying the tone “makes the book almost unreadable for me.”

— against Metamorphoses

Footnotes draw the sharpest complaint: readers describe the physical back-and-forth of “going from the front of the book to the back” as breaking the reading rhythm, notes Eliot himself later admitted he'd added partly to pad the volume to length. Some readers call The Waste Land itself incomprehensible on a first pass and stay unsure what they took away even after repeated readings and outside research, one admitting “I wished I hadn't understood some.” A critic goes further, calling the poem “more an incoherent hash than a multilingual journey” and even “the most overrated poem in the Anglo-American canon.” Poetry skeptics report only partial conversion: passages that “didn't gel as well,” and a verdict on Eliot himself closer to “he's no Bob Dylan, but he's okay.”

— against The Waste Land and Other Poems