Teaching Difficulty

Eliot wrote that modern art “must be difficult,” and readers of The Waste Land have agreed that his poem fits that description.1 While his early critics disputed whether it was nonsensical—“unable to make head or tail of it”2—or brilliant—“The music of ideas”3—there was consensus on its difficulty. The Waste Land has exemplified modernist difficulty for a century. As teachers, how should we handle its difficulty in our classrooms? I’ll suggest in this brief essay a few ways that we can encourage students to describe the poem’s difficulty—or its multiple difficulties—as precisely as possible. The goal is not to make the poem itself easy to understand, but to clarify how we can and should read The Waste Land. The difficulty never goes away but can, itself, be better understood. First, it is worth noting that The Waste Land’s difficulty today is not exactly the same as it was one hundred years ago. In 1922, the most common accounts of the poem’s difficulty attribute it to fragmentation. “It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and confused [...] [however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each thing falls into place.”4 I suspect that students in the twenty-first century are less jolted by quick jump cuts and multiple voices, and probably less challenged by the poem’s much-vaunted disillusionment. Eliot protested this description—“When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a