Making sense of Eliot's Waste Land

In memory of dear friend WS - whom I will now ID as William Saunders - who died yesterday ending years of his suffering, today's post is on poetry, which Bill and I discussed often. Over the past few weeks I have been reading The Waste Land, which I mistakenly thought I new pretty well, having graduated all the way back in high school from the Prufrock to advanced Eliot, The Waste Land. But what I really "knew," like most readers I'm afraid, were the famous first stanza and last lines (the Shanti incantation). The rest, I don't know, I think over the years in grad school and maybe later I just read through the poem trying to make some literal sense of it and picking up an image here and there w/out really grappling with what Eliot was trying to accomplish. He had already established himself as a unique talent in use of blank verse (with occasional rhyme included, to build up to a shock effect - as I have long thought that the 3rd line in Prufrock is the most startling line in the history of English verse), and in Prufrock and some other early poems he developed a pastiche style, a collection of disparate images that constitute a whole. But it's so much simpler in P: a poem in the voice of a single narrator, taking stock of his life in late age. The Waste Land is infinitely more ambitious, a portrait of London in ruins in the dark wake of the World War. We again have many literary references (far more diverse and obscure than those in P) and many narratives, some in first person - but from a variety of speakers and from several points of consciousness, some much like the "found poetry" that became popular decades later among American writers as diverse as WC Williams and Michael Casey; the overall effect in TSE is one of despair, a world without faith or hope (despite the prayers in the 5th and final section), impossible to see in coherence as it's an exploded world - like much of modern art at the time, think of what Picasso did to the still life and the portrait - TSE's work is the literary equivalent. There are some things I hated and still hate about this poem: the complete obscurity of many of the quotes and references, hardly elucidated at all by TSE's gratuitous "notes," and the snobbish contempt for the language and predilections of the working classes. But there also are passages of tremendous, and complex, beauty, which I think I never before appreciated, including for ex. the opening of Part III (quoting now from text): The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf/Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind/Crosses the brown land, unheard." Also in part I the great scene of the dead crossing London Bridge, "Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled/And each man fixed his eyes before his feet." Superficially, this is TSE's vision of a parade of the dead, but more frightfully, it's his vision of what a ordinary London pedestrians, commuting to work probably, who appear as though dead, deracinated, and silenced. The key to reading this poem is, I think, to attend to each segment, don't race over any passages or phrases but take each into account, while throughout building and maintaining a grand image of society and a culture at a frightful moment in its history.