‘O City, city’: Sounding Th e Waste Land Now
Prof. Hugh Haughton
Department of English & Related Literature
University of York
Abstract:
I will be talking about sound eects and the city, focusing on the noise, music and multiple voices sounded in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which began brewing in Eliot’s brain in London nearly 100 years ago (before publication in late 1922). I will be focusing mainly on Eliot’s ways of conjuring the modern city in its central section, ‘The Fire Sermon’, the heart of its polyvocal, multiply allusive modern soundscape. David Fuller notes that ‘although he had no technical training, music was the art that personally aected Eliot most deeply’, and I want to think of Eliot’s dissonant, metropolitan poem in terms of what the Russian Poet Osip Mandelstam calls the ‘noise of time’, and more specically, the noise of modernity, viewed from now a hundred years on.
