Today I am starting a new personal project: the Waste Land project.
I know very little about The Waste Land. It’s a Modern poem by T.S. Eliot and, well, that’s about it. It keeps cropping up in various other things I’ve read over the last few years, so it must be important in some sense or another; I just have no real feeling of what that sense might be.
And so the idea came to me to spend a set period of time reading The Waste Land and exploring it, its meaning, its references, its context and its place in (modern?) culture.
The idea is to spend the next 6 months – until Christmas – reading pretty much only The Waste Land and things associated with it. As much as possible I will explore it myself, by which I mean I won’t simply search straight away for what other people have said about it, nor buy the Norbury Critical Notes that achieves everything I’m seeking to do through this project.
This belies a final reason for undertaking this project: to create some space, focus and flow for myself in one tiny area of the physical and mental worlds. Physical, in the sense that I’ll do it mainly amidst the noise and selfishness of train journeys; mental, in the sense that it will be a focus away from the well-known sinks of time I’ve reflected on before.
I will try to document the project as I go. It’s worth noting that I don’t have any particular eye or training when it comes to poetry and literature; I’m also quite a poor completer/finisher. By making this project relatively public, then, there is both risk (of being stupid in public) and reward (a benign motivation that comes from the possibility people may be reading this).
Finally, you are of course very welcome to join in. Please do leave thoughts, links, questions, provocations in the comments or via Twitter – I tweet @rich_w and will try to use #wasteland throughout the project.
arbitrary constant 
Good luck with this. Elliot was a tricky character but a masterful poet. I studied the Waste Land at uni and it really has influenced so much of late 20th and early 21st century culture. I look forward to reading your thoughts!