https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land
Eliot would lean toward the second. "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood," he wrote, in an essay on Dante. "It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship." What he sought, as both a writer and a reader, was "some direct shock of poetic intensity." True to that quest, "The Waste Land" is a symphony of shocks, and, like other masterworks of early modernism, it refuses to die down. (Go to MOMA and let your gaze move across Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," from west to east. If you don't flinch when you reach the faces on the right, bladed and scraped like shovels, consult your optician.) The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless:
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
I happen to think, for what it's worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of "The Waste Land," are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double "o" of "rooms." And the word "surrender" could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will face that overwhelming question: "What have we given?" It is something that each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.
