These emotional experiences Do not hold good: Remembering Wagner in The Waste Land

This essay asks why so much Wagner has run aground in The Waste Land. Although the scope, style, and emotional range of their artistic projects might appear wildly at odds, Wagner and T.S. Eliot shared preoccupations with voice and memory, which produced receptions in some ways comparable. Investigating The Waste Lands desiccated Wagnerian inscriptions, it explores the poems uses of Wagner, apparently so distanced from music and feeling. Since simultaneous fragmentation and over-saturation were already a part of the Wagnerian experience, audiences might come upon these fragments in comparable ways and traces a series of responses in different audiences, from George Eliot and Verlaine to Bergson and Nietzsche. Considering musics intimate philosophical connections to emotion and memory, it finds that by examining half-hearings and re-readings and moments of suppressed distanced recall of musics emotional connections, the poem cannot help but remember.