Perhaps because Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965), like myself, was a transplant from the American Midwest to England—or perhaps because my closest friend long ago used to recite "The Waste Land" with such unveiled urgency it felt wrong to admit I didn't understand it, or perhaps because every time we pass into April I feel swollen with emptiness — T. S. Eliot and his wasted lands have been an opaque companion these many orbits around the sun.

(With the climate crisis, Eliot's imagery - dry, cracked landscapes - gain poignancy.)

Death Valley, California. The hottest temperature on Earth, 134F, was recorded in 1913. The poem foretells: "Here is no water, only rock." Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

When I dug into Stephen Fry's indispensable guide to poetry, I sat next to Eliot's The Waste Land with sleeves rolled up.

What are the roots that clutch, and what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say; or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.

Neither Eliot nor "The Waste Land" (he was adamant it should be two words) are to be entered lightly. Eliot combined classic drama, poetic references, Grail lore, and Buddhist and Hindu texts to form this spectacular piece of five sections.

Eliot glorified erudition to the point of obscurity. He introduces the poem with a few lines in Latin, Greek, Italian, and English.   Eliot dedicated the collection to American poet Ezra Pound, who was also writing in London. Although poor himself, Pound organized a fund, "Bel Espirit," to assist Eliot financially.       
      
According to Ernest Hemingway, who was asked by Pound to contribute, [t]he idea of Bel Espirit was that we all contribute a part of whatever we earned to provide a fund to get Mr Eliot out of the bank so he would have money to write poetry. According to Ernest Hemingway's memoirs, Pound also reviewed manuscripts of "The Waste Land," the publication and highly well-received reception of which obviated the need for the fund.

Eliot's most common imagery—from which the poem draws its true strength—is nature. Nature is empty of human presence or comfort. Nature exists in the most unimaginable form, knowable but vile.

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of the leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are
departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Despite its uneasy depth and slowly unfolding brilliance of all 20th-century poetry, "The Waste Land" persists monumentally above almost all others and was part of the canon that won Eliot the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Legendary movie critic Roger Ebert once wrote that he approached it emotionally when he couldn't grasp a movie intellectually. He strove to answer 'How did this make me feel?' as a foundation for a film's greatness.   I believe there is knowledge in feeling and power in wonder. I recommend Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder about opening our mind to knowledge and feeling obtained through senses, Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out on how wonder of knowledge leads to more knowledge and Sidney Lumet's conviction of filmmaking.

Photograph by Australian landscape artist Andrew Wurster.

Irish painter Francis Bacon (described by his colleagues as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know') echoes Ebert's sentiment: "Yeats is probably a greater poet than Eliot, but in the end, I prefer that whole atmosphere of Eliot... I love the feeling you get in 'The Waste Land.'"

Indeed. The feeling of desolation.

To store what water there is, these plants have assumed an insect-like dendrite form, compounding the creepy vignette. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Tapping into one's emotive complexity is critical to Eliot's "The Waste Land." There is no mistaking the barrenness of the place and the dry, stale wind that crawls over you as you read.  It suggests an existential non-existence. The kind that occupied and eclipsed philosopher Susan Sontag when she was dying and engaged the poetic frustrations of novelist Hermann Hesse his entire life. 

Eliot continues to paint the scene:

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain.

A fascinating comparison to Eliot is the war and consciousness poems of Wilfred Owen. Owen was a contemporary of Eliot (though not in the same social circles) who fought and died for Britain in The Great War. Owen was also one of the first poets to portray the horrific realities of war and our loss of humanity when we shrug at death. He did this when his countrymen, like Kipling and W. G. Wells were tapped by the government to write pro-war nationalist propaganda.

Both poets wrote of the same world simultaneously, yet Owen's verse is full of passion and emotion.

Out there, we walked quite friendly up to Death,
Sat down and ate beside him, cool and bland,-
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath, -
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
He's spat at us with bullets, and he's coughed
Shrapnel. We chorused if he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.
From Wilfred Owen's poem The Next War.

 While "The Waste Land" feels deadened and intellectually distant, it is harrowing in its own way.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
there is the empty chapel, only the wind's home
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

As an editor with the famous poetry publishing house Faber & Faber, Eliot nurtured many writers and talents throughout his career. One of his brightest, Marianne Moore, a poet of precision and imagination, created perilous imagery in the erudite fashion of Eliot.

"Attack is more piquant than concord," but when
You tell me frankly that you would like to feel
My flesh beneath your feet,
I’m all abroad; I can but put my weapon up, and
Bow you out.
Gesticulation – it is half the language.
Let unsheathed gesticulation be the steel
Your courtesy must meet,
Since in your hearing words are mute, which to my senses
Are a shout.
Marianne Moore's "To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity." 
Listen to a reading here.

I confess to not understanding the poetic technicalities of "The Waste Land," but the older I become, the more this poem resonates emotionally. American poet Mark Strand argued poetry can be written in spontaneous experience; it can be read as such, too. We all have entombed feelings that move through us like waves. The swells rise and fall and occasionally, spit drops into our consciousness, but they usually die back, and we remain as we are.

As philosopher Gaston Bachelard once observed: "Poetry gives us back the situations of our dreams." Poetry empowers our emotional swells. It changes what we know and accept about the world and one another. It pulls us into the situations of our dreams. Or, in the case of "The Waste Land," our nightmares.