Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula

His recent books include Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century and History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism. Soon they would be known by a more evocative name: Dada.

He is the author of nine scholarly books and three poetry collections and the coeditor of two anthologies. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell (A French connection in. Lanier Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia. Destruction was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the 20th Century by Jed Rasula (Dada in context). Along the way, we learn about Eliot’s storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the “men of 1914.”įilled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.” In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music.įrom its famous opening, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” to its closing Sanskrit mantra, “Shantih shantih shantih,” The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers.

Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “ The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland for a series of bizarre performances.

Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula