Reading the Waste Land from the Bottom Up

Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up is a guidebook to the footnotes of T.S. Eliot's notoriously allusive poem. While information on The Waste Land sources can be daunting when heaped at the bottom of the page in an anthology, using the notes as starting points can open up the poem in unexpected ways. This book provides a summary of each source and a discussion aimed at reconfiguring our sense of the poem. Organized according to Eliot's line numbers, chapters are free-standing and can be read in any order. The book, which is designed to be both useful to academics and accessible to undergraduates, gives readers a working knowledge of the poem's footnotes and suggests that beginning with its sources - far from making The Waste Land intractable - actually offers a productive, surprisingly understandable approach to it.