#69: The Waste Land: The Poem That Changed Literature Forever | Prof. Jayme Stayer

One hundred years after its publication, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land remains one of the most quoted, most difficult, and most argued-over poems in the English language. In this episode of The Prometheans, I sit down with Fr. Jayme Stayer, S.J. — professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, past president of the International T. S. Eliot Society, and author of Becoming T. S. Eliot — to trace how the poem actually came into being: Eliot's breakdown and recovery in Margate and Lausanne, Ezra Pound's radical editorial cuts, and the 1971 rediscovery of the original drafts that rewrote everything scholars thought they knew.

We go beyond composition history into the poem's intellectual scaffolding — the Fisher King myth, Frazer's The Golden Bough, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, and Eliot's deliberate weaving of Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist sources into a single portrait of post-war civilizational exhaustion. And we close by asking the question a centenary forces on every reader: does a poem written out of one man's crisis in 1922 still diagnose something true about the world a hundred years later — or does it need to be read differently now?

This conversation sits at the intersection of literature, history, and the philosophy of religion — exploring how sacred and mythic traditions from across civilizations can converge in a single work of art without being flattened into one another.

About the guest:

Fr. Jayme Stayer, S.J. is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago and past president of the International T. S. Eliot Society. He is the author of Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in "Inventions of the March Hare" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) and co-editor of Volume 5 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, winner of the MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. His writing on The Waste Land includes "Ambition and Despair: The Centenary of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land" (Catholic Herald) and "Snuggling Up to the Abyss" in The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.

About The Prometheans:

The Prometheans is a podcast and YouTube series exploring philosophy of religion, interfaith dialogue, and the great intellectual traditions of East and West — hosted by Ali Zaka (AZD).

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