Information about the poet T.S. Eliot and his works, notably The Waste Land.
This page used to contain a description of the book T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land. A copy of the original version of this page and the book description still exists on my site.
Those interested can read about the reasons I changed this page and more about this page below.
Here is the list of T.S. Eliot related material at my web site. One of the pages listed below contains links to Eliot material at other web sites.
This page contains a description of the book T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons by Dr. James E. Miller Jr, a book I recommend highly.
The page also contains my review (of sorts) of the book and how important it is in understanding The Waste Land. If you don't understand The Waste Land, read Dr. Miller's book. If you don't read the book at least read my page describing it.
The Waste Land was a complete muddle to me when I first read it. Dr. Miller's book changed my opinion of the poem and indirectly led me to create a web site about it.
My site is a learning resource for the poem with hyperlinked notes, definitions, translations, cross references, texts of works alluded to, commentary, and questions to the reader. It contains descriptions of books and has an extensive list of links to other Eliot related material on the web. This is a large site containing far in excess of 600 html pages.
My Exploring The Waste Land web site has an extensive list of links to T.S. Eliot related material found at other web sites.
The blurb to Dr. Miller's book states
[This] is the first critical work to investigate in depth the sources of the poem in Eliot's life, with particular attention to Eliot's "Calamus"-like attachment to a French youth during Eliot's graduate year in Paris, his subsequent precipitate (and disasterous) marriage following the death of his young French friend in World War I, and his 1921 nervous breakdown (suffering from what he called "an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction") that led to the writing of The Waste Land.The French youth was Jean Verdenal and my page explores the relationship between Eliot and his friend Verdenal. Also explored is the possibility that Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, in Eliot's poem The Waste Land is an allusion to Verdenal.
The importance of this friendship can be seen by Eliot's dedicating to Verdenal his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and other Observations.
When I started work on this web page I expected that visitors to it would be able to satisfy their curiousities about Countess Marie Larisch, the real-life Marie of The Waste Land.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,As I researched her life I found out that she and her cousin, the archduke, are more important to understanding The Waste Land than may be expected (think scandal.)
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
While doing some research on Guido Guinizelli, the 13th century poet, I came across a possible connection between a work of his, Al Cor Gentil ("In the Gentle Heart") and Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I have not seen this connection noted anywhere else.
This page is an updated copy of a post I made to the T.S. Eliot Discussion List on April 30, 1999.
This page used to be entitled "Pointer to T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land." I changed the contents of this page because out on the web there are a significant number of pages with links to this one. However, since this page was written in 1996, I have created many more T.S. Eliot related pages, including a complete web site in excess of 600 pages. So, to be more useful to it's visitors, in March 2000 I made this page more generally about T.S. Eliot.
This page used to have a description of the book T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land by Dr. James E. Miller Jr., a book I recommend highly. If you don't understand The Waste Land, read Dr. Miller's book.
A copy of the original version of this page still exists on my site.
This page written and maintained by Rickard A. Parker
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E-mail Rickard A. Parker at
raparker@theworld.com