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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

For those not familiar with The Waste Land, it's a ten page or so poem about the decay of knowledge and purpose in modern life (circa 1920s). It's regarded as one of the first/founding works of literary 'modernism.' Interestingly, a large portion of its text consists of fragments of other works, and it's littered with countless subtle references/allusions to other things. Drawing meaning from it requires investigation of these links; you need to follow the trail.

The person who made this website is a software engineer, without any university qualifications or formal education in literary analysis. It's also one of the best resources about this poem you can find - and there are literally thousands of books and papers to compete with. The hypertext format didn't exist when The Waste Land was written, but its a perfect fit.

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My sense is that he was trying to understand modern life as a classicist would understand ancient times. Trying to create that heighten state of fragmentary deep meaning, etc. -- but mapped to the disillusionment he felt in the present.

Normally a classicist is involved in the function of:

Classicist -> immerses in ancient literature

Eliot's 'trick' is that he would attempt higher order functions and map the whole technique to the present:

[Classicist -> immerses in ancient literature] -> immerses a Classical understanding of the present,

which makes the present seem Classical in importance. Nor is that the only way to go. But I think one of the greatest things that Eliot offers through his poetry is this challenge to become more sharply critical (the same way philologists must rise to the level of their material, after translating, etc.). Hypertextuality helps a lot. But, as I think Tycho sort of hints at here and in other comments, the goal is to engage the whole approach.

I think you are right. I think the epigraph tells us a lot. It refers to 'the Sybil' a Greek prophetess who wrote Appollo's oracles/prophecies on leaves which then scattered in the wind before followers had a chance to digest their information. If we take these leaves to represent the deeply significant facts/patterns/secrets of a civilization, the classicist has had time to 'gather the leaves' and make sense of it all. In The Waste Land the leaves of modern times are gathered, but no sense has been made, or some are missing. In fact, as the epigraph says, the Sybil 'wants to die.' The process through which deeper meaning/understanding is generated and dispersed cannot sustain itself any longer, because the dispersal, the scattering, is too violent.

The epigraph actually being written in ancient Greek with no translation provided is the icing on the cake.

This is a wonderful resource, despite the difficulty of navigating all of the content. Where did it come from? Are there others?

As far as I know its a one of a kind, set up by a hobbyist. It draws on the notes Eliot supplied himself though (they are actually linked alongside the lines they correspond to); and no doubt on the work of other scholars to unravel the poem's mysteries.

There are other good candidates for this sort of treatment though: poetry of Ezra Pound, lyrics of MF DOOM...

Nabokov's Ada is given similar hypertextuality here:

http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/

Here is a similar treatment of Das Racist lyrics:

http://blog.mtviggy.com/2010/03/16/an-exercise-in-futility-d...

There are many works that fit into this format, e.g. Joyce's Ulysses, the classics, etc.

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