I have been intrigued by Eliot’s poetry (without ever fully understanding it) since I first read The Waste Land at university. What fascinates me is the richness of the literary allusions from a wide range of sources.
The American poet and critic Louis Untermeyer once dismissed Eliot (and Joyce) as “crossword-puzzle-school” writers. Another critic, writing ten years after the publication of The Waste Land, said that it “may be a great poem; on the other hand it may be just a rather pompous crossword puzzle”. There can no longer be any doubt that it’s the former: however enjoyable it may be to try to ‘solve’ the poem, the idea of a single correct answer is an illusion.
What can be done, however, is to reverse the process. I decided to try to honour the poem with a Listener puzzle not merely rich in thematic material, but in which every clue was thematic. As JFD, I had originally planned this puzzle for the poem’s centenary in October 2022. However, despite submitting over 18 months in advance, I was distraught to learn that I had been beaten to it by another puzzle on the same theme. It looked as if all my work had been in vain but a two year interval, together with the sixtieth anniversary of Eliot’s death on 6 January 1965, was enough to persuade the editors to repeat the theme — this time using a sobriquet which was an anagram of RIP TSE.
After starting with Phlebas and Tiresias, around whom so much of the poem turns, the grid largely filled itself. When it came to clueing, the requirement for each clue to echo an identifiable section of the poem imposed some serious surface constraints. In some cases these were a help: indeed at times, it almost felt as if the clues had been waiting for me within the poem! But other clues cost me dearly. HYPOCOTYL, in particular, defied a useable definition for many months. And the less said about BORDURE the better!
Two things quickly became apparent. First, the puzzle’s theme was going to be difficult to obscure, even for solvers unfamiliar with the poem, so I decided to make a virtue of this. As well as using the poem as the source of clues, I would introduce references to Eliot, Pound etc in plain sight without making any attempt to disguise the theme. Secondly, putting clues together in pairs would reduce the number of discrete references and give me a little more narrative freedom, while at the same time making it more of a challenge for solvers to determine where one clue finished and the next began.
This puzzle was a labour of love for me. I have subsequently discovered that Eliot himself was a lover of cryptic crosswords (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, developed at much the same time as modernist literature). Eliot once described his delight at “finding a reference to myself and my works in The Times crossword puzzle”. I hope that, more than a century later, he would have been pleased by an entire crossword.
My thanks, as always to the editors, as well as to the incomparable Shackleton (John Guiver) for test solving the puzzle and making several indispensable suggestions.
Two points of detail. The embarrassing error was introduced at the review stage in the interest of shortening an overlong clue, but the responsibility for failing to spot it is entirely mine: I hope it did not detract too much from the enjoyment. But the US spelling of ‘ax’ was a deliberate echo of Ezra Pound’s contribution to editing the poem.
JFD/Priest