Don't Get Taken In!

When I was 16, and studying for 'O' Level, a relative gave me a second-hand copy of T.S.Eliot's early poems, and I fell upon them like a ravening er... jackass. They were hard, or even impossible, to understand. 'The Waste Land' was full of quotations in Greek, Latin, French, German, and even Sanskrit, and was obviously, therefore, so profoundly cultured and intellectual, that my lack of understanding revealed only my own inadequacy. Away with Shakespeare, Miton, Pope, Tennyson, and all the other versifying nobodies! Here was poetry! I had to learn to understand and appreciate it.

And then, about 20 years ago, I read a remark by The Great Man, which I cannot track down, but which went something like this:

Many people have tried to understand 'The Waste Land', and worried about its meaning, but really, it doesn't mean very much. It was just a sort of generalised moan.

The confession of yet another plausible and empty fraud, like so many others - Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Ted Hughes, Louis McNiece, et al who never came clean. At least Eliot confessed.

Once, I had tried to like them, shamelessly bogus as I was. It was an illness.

I think I am healthier now.