The One Whom Speaks for Them All

Written in 1922, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a vastly studied Modernist poem. Among the many literary scholars and analysts, Lawrence Rainey has dedicated much of his professional time to this integral poem. Regarding Eliot’s poem, he has written a book entitled The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, which includes the poem in its entirety, Eliot’s original notes regarding the difficult piece, and Rainey’s own annotations of his findings while studying The Waste Land. For many young literary scholars studying the poem, this book can be of huge help because it connects the author’s notes with the historical context and the numerous allusions found in the poem. With the help of Eliot and Rainey’s notes, many of the widely shared confusions concerning this piece can be resolved. Even those who read The Waste Land purely for entertainment recognize the persistent changes in voice after only finishing the first section, “The Burial of The Dead.” The question then arises, who is the speaker of the poem? Keeping T.S. Eliot’s notes and Lawrence Rainey’s annotations regarding The Waste Land, readers can learn that there is, indeed, one sole narrator for the entire length of the poem. Although only directly mentioned in one of the five sections of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tiresias is the most important persona because of his ability to encompass and represent all of the poem’s characters.

Beginning with “The Burial of The Dead,” one can uncover many different voices by simply listening for subtle changes in expression. Eliot opens this section from a woman’s perspective; this is apparent not only because readers are given her name, but also because of the chatty pace of the lines. Then, something changes in the followi...

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...After just having finished “The Burial of The Dead,” the premier section of The Waste Land, readers can already begin to feel overwhelmed by the constant fluctuations in voice. While it may seem unrealistic to assign one character the job of narrator, with the help of the author’s notes and a scholar’s annotations on the text, the task becomes easier. If it were not for Eliot’s clarifications, readers may not understand the significance of Tiresias. Likewise, without Lawrence Rainey’s annotations in his book The Annotated Waste Land, and other scholar’s research alike, many readers may be left confused while reading this allusive poem. Despite the widely shared confusion regarding the identity of the speaker among many young literary analysts, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is integral in all literary studies and should remain the corner stone of Modernist literature.