Poetry Appreciation

After Monday’s class I was really impressed with the way in which there are different ways of understanding a poem. Some people seem to only want to examine poetry from an academic standpoint, but I think we showed yesterday how this does not always need to be the case. In relation to academic understanding, Eliot says in the introduction to his poem, “In ‘The Waste Land’ I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying” (473). Therefore, we can see that even Eliot wasn’t sure how his poem would be viewed academically. Yet, there are other ways to examine a poem, and I would like to talk about some of those ways.

The first and most obvious way I can think of is to gain appreciation for a poem by seeing the myriad ways people perceive it. In class I thought it was really interesting how the different groups presented their sections of the poem. Some gave dialogs, others acted out the action, and others even made their own little skits. Clearly, we all had different ways of looking at our material and presenting it, but in the end these different perspectives helped us understand the common theme in the poem about human degradation. Therefore, one way to appreciate a poem is by examining the different perspectives from which it can be viewed and seeing what can be learned from these different perspectives.

Another way to appreciate a poem is to examine its artistic merit. At many points throughout my reading I wasn’t entirely sure what Eliot’s point was, but I was still able to appreciate the fact that “The Waste Land” is very artistically written. Consider, for example, his lines which read “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many.” (60-62). The wording is simple, but the imagery of the “brown fog” and the prospect of so many people left empty and “undone” by death creates a rather poignant, artistic portrayal of human life. Therefore, another way to appreciate a poem, even when the academic point of the poem is not clear, is to look for the places in which the poet displays artistic ability.

Do I have a deep understanding of “The Waste Land”? Certainly not. I still have a lot to learn from the study of this poem. Yet, after yesterday’s class I came away with the important understanding that a poem does not always have to be understood from the academic standpoint. Clearly, the artistic values the poem or the different ways in which it can perceived both add to an appreciation of the text. However, I’m still interested to see what we talk about tomorrow, as we continue our search for meaning in Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”