Saturday, December 15, 2007

Success as albatross

Many writers, at all levels, have this experience: a "hit" that becomes identified with them, even though the writer feels s/he has "grown beyond" the popular work. In my case, "Christmas at the Juniper Tavern" is such a work.
He Do the Police in Different Voices

On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was published -- making something of a benchmark for modern literature, given that Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Jacob's Room were also published that year.

Even before book publication Eliot said that he had grown beyond The Waste Land; when everyone began calling it and him the voice of a generation, or of the Age, he began to regard the poem as an albatross. But running from the label and the attention was to no avail, and as the poem and the poet were placed on an ever-higher pedestal, so each became a larger target for gossip and parody.
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