A Pebble on the Beach

In October 1922; the British literary magazine The Criterion, and in November, the American magazine The Dial; published T S Elliot’s modernist poem The Wasteland, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the great poetic works of the twentieth century. To mark its centenary, in 2022: and to contrast the present with the past, a poem was written by Jackson’s Edge called A Scapeshifter, using the format of the Wasteland as a template with its epigraph, and five further parts, attempting to use what T S Elliot described as a return to common language, which he said occurs in poetry every one hundred years or so. T S Elliot claimed that the poem he intended to initially call He Do the Police in Different Voices, took as its inspiration; Jessie L Weston’s book, From Ritual to Romance, which he reviewed. Jackson’s Edge claimed he took his inspiration for A Scapeshifter, from the author Duncan Hamilton’s book; The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus. The Wasteland was made an incomparably better poem by the ruthless edit of Ezra Pound; born on the 30th October 1885, and A Scapeshifter was put to music, video, and narration (David Meller), by Lol Cooper, who was born on the 70th anniversary of Ezra Pounds birth, and which made A Scapeshifter an incomparably more entertaining effort, than simply the written version in Poli-Publishing’s Soul to Sun; in terms of drawing attention to the reason for, connections to, and the quality of the creative artistic genius of T S Elliot’s The Wasteland. The poem A Scapeshifter was loaded onto you tube on the 137th anniversary of Ezra Pounds birth. This sort of synchronicity will, no doubt, be mocked as mumbo jumbo, by the materialists and their naturalism, which were the focus of The Wasteland, but never the less; they are that they are; hidden away on full view in enemy territory, but where better to hide the pebble than on the beach. The poem A Scapeshifter also contains allusions to other works of literature from 1922, as well as before and after; to also follow the path prepared by T S Elliot who was remarkably well read, and a genius of organisation, who ransacked the literature of the past in his literary work shop, to produce his great work: though many an Elliot aficianado, considers The Four Quartets to be the poets masterpiece. The centennial anniversary of The Wasteland goes on into 2023, as its first publication in book form came in 1923, by Hogarth Press; then run by Elliot’s friends the Woolf’s: though Virginia Woolf was displeased with T S Elliot, when he underwent his conversion experience. The contrasts between one hundred years ago, and now, are multi dimensional, and spread out like ripples in a pond where a pebble of the beach has been thrown into the water. The denizens of The Wasteland are caught up in meaningless circles of repetition; like a wheel spinning but going nowhere; like The Hollow Men; The Wasteland abstract.