Sherry Chandler

A Kentucky source influence for Eliot’s “The Wasteland?”

I found this yesterday in a review by Christopher Hitchens of The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (Lawrence Rainey, editor):

Still, it is surprising to find no mention at all, in this extensively sourced volume, of Madison Cawein’s poem Waste Land. Cawein was as distant from Eliot, in poetic terms, as it was possible to be. He was a Kentucky blues man and a barroom versifier. However, like Eliot, he was fascinated by the Celtic twilight and the search for the Grail. And his verses, with their haunting title, did appear in the January 1913 edition of Poetry magazine. Since that very issue also contained an essay by Ezra Pound on the new poets writing in London, it seems more rather than less likely that Eliot would have read it.

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;

Like a dead weed, grey and wan,

Or a breath of dust. I looked again –

And man and dog were gone,

Like wisps of the graying dawn.

The review is reproduced from The Atlantic Monthly at Powells.com. The entire review is rather snide and fun to read, satisfyingly deflating of both Eliot and Ezra Pound for collaboration on what Hitchens terms “the most overrated poem in the Anglo-American canon. ” Chacun a son gout, I suppose.

But the question I’m left with is: who knew there was a Madison Cawein?

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