“April is the cruellest month”
Promenade in Tutzing, April 2022: “Summer attacked us, came across Lake Starnberg”
Quelle: picture alliance / Wagner
A hundred years ago, TS Eliot wrote “The Wasteland,” one of the most ill-tempered poems of all time: “Out of resentment against life,” he said. In fact, the world of ideas of the famous verses reaches as far as Putin’s whisperer Alexander Dugin.
VAlmost exactly a hundred years ago a certain Thomas Stearns Eliot – a child of the Mississippi, a man of many compulsions, prejudices and a humor mostly suppressed by force – went to Paris to have a poem cut down. The cut – from 800 basic to 433 acidic verses – was done by a certain Ezra Pound, who had already served as an obstetrician for James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
And so was born Das wuste Land, a poem that is now considered the primeval scream of modernism, although TS Eliot liked neither screams nor modernism. As a trained Brit, he also spoke about his own poem with a stiff upper lip: “Various critics,” he explained, have interpreted his poem as contemporary criticism, “but for me it was just a release from a … personal grudge against life”.
And fact: “The desert land” is a fabulously bad-tempered poem that insults the budding spring already in the first line: “April is the most cruel month.” No trace of new life, instead the “lilac” just drives out of “dead earth” and melts the snow of oblivion; one hears in the poem that the First World War was only a few years before Eliot wrote it.
But even peace is nothing to be gained in the alienated modern age – not in Munich, where summer “attacks” the poem, and certainly not in “unreal” London, where a depressed, sightless crowd creeps sighing over London Bridge and the poem watching a “tip girl” and a pimpled employee have their dreary and holy sex.
“Classical, reactionary and revolutionary”
Eternal truths are not to be had in the modern world; That is why Eliot buried his insatiable longing for them deep in his poem. When he alludes to the Arthurian legend and the Holy Grail, then he wants to say “none of the evidence”.
TS Eliot (left) on the subway. Drawing by Feliks Topolski
Quelle: Getty Images
TS Eliot didn’t think much of the “eclectic, tolerant and democratic” spirit of the Roaring Twenties, he preferred the 20th century to be “classical, reactionary and revolutionary”. Much of his thinking can be found in so-called traditionalism, whose long history stretches from all sorts of proto-fascists to Valdimir Putin’s ideological whisperer Alexander Dugin, who can only see “unreal cities” full of soulless “tip girls” in the West.
![Portrait of Italian philosopher Julius Evola a Rome, Italie mai 1974 (Portrait of italian philosopher Julius Evola in Rome, Italy may 1974) Photograph ©Sandro Becchetti/Leemage [ Rechtehinweis: picture alliance/Leemage ]](https://img.welt.de/img/kultur/literarischewelt/mobile204813702/9302505117-ci102l-w1024/Portrait-du-philosophe-italien-Julius-Evola-a-Rome-Italie-mai-1974-Portrait-2.jpg)
But worldview is one thing, the other is living art. In any case, modernism, against which TS Eliot campaigned, has fundamentally defeated him in the field of his radically modern verses. No matter what Eliot wanted, they have become the Magna Carta of a modern form that is eclectic, tolerant, and democratic. “Shantih shantih shantih” – three times the Sanskrit word for inner peace – ends Eliot’s famous poem with this incantation.
And maybe such inner peace is really a bit harder to come by for eclectic, tolerant and democratic spirits. But they understand the external peace.