April is upon us but it’s no longer Chaucer’s lusty month “with his showers sweet,” nor even Shakespeare’s “proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,” but instead “the cruellest month.” The red-winged blackbirds are back and that tells me that soon another flock will be busily achirp in our groves and glades, for April is also “National Poetry Month,” and our native songsters will be vying to regale us with their latest melodies from every perch on offer. I don’t know who came up this idea of a poetry month, or why; but I suppose that T.S. Eliot, that saboteur of spring, and “The Waste Land,” are somehow vaguely implicated.

“April is the cruellest month” because it drags us back into life. And Eliot, in 1922, when “The Waste Land” first appeared, was a reluctant Lazarus. In his inimitable diaries Harold Nicolson records a vivid glimpse of the poet at a luncheon they shared on March 2, 1932, ten years after that poem had made him famous:

He is very yellow and glum. Perfect manners. He looks like a sacerdotal lawyer – dyspeptic, ascetic, eclectic. Inhibitions. Yet obviously a nice man and a great poet. My admiration for him does not flag. He is without pose and full of poise. He makes one feel that all cleverness is an excuse for thinking hard.

Nicolson’s description accords well with other impressions of Eliot, from Virginia Woolf’s sniffy appraisal to Donald Hall’s adoring reminiscences. The buttoned-up, repressed, rather pompous figure, vaguely ailing but unfailingly dapper, often takes a brief and unctuous bow in memoirs of the period.

How odd that this pinstriped personification of inhibition should have written what is easily the wildest, most extravagant poem in the language. As Eliot knew, and often said, there is no great poem without a touch of strangeness. And certainly “The Waste Land” qualifies as one of the strangest of poems. That it retains this jarring quality, some 83 years later, is a testimonial to a certain unexpected robustness.

In fact, in re-reading “The Waste Land,” it isn’t so much its weirdness as its manic energy that strikes me. Eliot’s inventory of maladies, real and imagined, along with the torment of his first marriage, has long been fodder for commentators; the poem is now seen – rightly, I believe – as much more autobiographical than it seemed at first. But the neurasthenia, the hysteria, the war-weariness and Baudelairean ennui of the poem (not to mention the plangent echoes of Vivien, his first wife’s, voice) have overshadowed its raucous vivacity.

Eliot began composing “The Waste Land” in 1919, around the time that Rainer Maria Rilke was patiently straining to recapture the angelic summons he had first heard, almost a decade earlier, from the ramparts of Duino Castle. But while Rilke eavesdropped on seraphs, Eliot was besieged by lowlier voices. The music hall, the pub, the office, the hubbub of the streets, scraps of verse and closing-time calls, shards of Sanskrit and snippets of German, Greek, French, and Italian, the rag-ends of lost conversations and fragmented chats, stormed his imagination. If Rilke was the vessel of the angels, Eliot was the conduit of the curbside.

What holds it all together with such riptide coherence? What links Marie with Madame Sosostris, “the hyacinth girl” with Stetson? Lil’s husband rubs elbows with Mr. Eugenides, the typist with Tiresias. There are bursts of Wagner and “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag” accompanied by “the pleasant whining of a mandoline.” And yet, this ostensible cacophony is perfectly contained, almost miniaturized, like a blizzard in a paperweight.

For the beginnings of an answer, you can now turn to “The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose” (Yale University Press; 270 pages; $35), edited by Lawrence Rainey. Mr. Rainey presents the poem along with 10 essays and sketches which Eliot wrote around the same time. He has provided extensive notes both to the poem and the essays, a selection of 15 black-and-white photographs of sites mentioned in “The Waste Land,” and an informative, if rather uninspired, introduction to Eliot’s life and career up to 1922. (Mr. Rainey even includes the 1912 musical score of “That Shakespearian Rag” by Gene Buck and Herman Ruby, and I have a sudden and awful vision of senior English professors gathering in some faculty lounge to croon it in unison.)

When we arrive at the text of the poem, after 57 pages thick with fact, it seems to spring forth, like Gulliver snapping his Lilliputian bonds. The editor means to enlighten Eliot’s readers, and he does so admirably, but there is also the uneasy sense that “The Waste Land” is still somehow too flammable to be presented without layers of protective wadding. (To be fair, Mr. Rainey has also published “Revisiting the Waste Land” (Yale University Press, 205 pages, $35), hot on the heels of this reader’s text, in which he not only elaborates on many of the points here made in notes, but pays refreshing tribute to the poem’s wry exuberance.)

Furthermore, by republishing Eliot’s contemporaneous prose, Mr. Rainey has performed a real service. The four “London Letters,” written for the Dial, show us a shrewd, curious, gossipy Eliot, a gadabout, avid for the theater and music hall as well as opera, ballet, the latest Stravinsky, the newest Picasso. The tone of the letters is arch, often pretentious; Eliot is trying to out-English the English (an endeavor he would perfect over the course of his career). Consider the following judgment on Harold Monro’s anthology “Some Contemporary Poets: 1920”:

Nearly the whole body of the Established Church of contemporary literature in America must appear a little ridiculous, if no worse, to even the most latitudinarian litterateurs of Established contemporary literature in England. I cannot conceive Mr. Edmund Gosse, for example, really being taken in by the effusions of Miss Repplier or the Reverend Mr. Crothers, although I can conceive of his commending them with a kindly Olympian patronage which might take in the recipients.

It isn’t the harshness – though we wince for poor Miss Repplier and the hapless Crothers – but rather, the supercilious phrasing and casual hauteur that set our teeth on edge.

But on the next page of the same letter, Eliot remarks, in his best aphoristic manner, that “Culture is traditional, and loves novelty; the General Reading Public knows no tradition, and loves staleness.” Could there be a more compact key to “The Waste Land” than the first half of this dictum?

If the “London Letters” show us an Eliot who is refreshingly au courant and almost “clubbable,” the formal essays included here remind us of how profound and astute a critic he was. No one who loves poetry could fail to benefit from his just and discerning insights into the works of Andrew Marvell or John Dryden, poets not much read today. Even his passing comments illumine whole periods, as when he notes that “Gray and Collins were masters, but they had lost that hold on human values, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a formidable achievement of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets.” He acknowledges these poets’ achievements but registers that something is missing from their poetry that has to do not with their gifts but with a downturn in sensibility.

That “firm grasp of human experience” propels “The Waste Land.” But the grasp is coupled with an extraordinary refinement. These two elements – raw boisterous vitality and uncommon cultivation – collide in the poem, each balancing the other. Just as the rowdy voices tinge the learned quotations (from Augustine, the Buddha, Baudelaire, and Dante, among others), so do the “fragments I have shored against my ruins” (in Eliot’s mock-Elizabethan line) shade the colloquial snatches of dialogue; the effect is at once ironic and poignant.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The initial quotation, as Mr. Rainey dutifully reminds us, is from “The Tempest” but that is perhaps its least notable aspect. The juxtapositions, which are violent, do not sunder but anneal the lines into a whole. What brings Shakespeare and lunching fishmen, a pub and a church, mandolins and chatter, together here, as in the entire poem, is Eliot’s music. Sometimes his music is a washtub and a twanging saw, at others it’s grand opera, at still others it’s a Heifetzean cadenza. Even so, as his friend Ezra Pound would write, “it all coheres.” Eliot’s poetry is never far from song. This accounts for the emotional impact of “The Waste Land,” as well as for the incantatory spell it casts. Mr. Rainey’s compilation, and his more detailed study, give us all the data we need to decipher allusions or elucidate enigmas. Beyond that, if you still want to acknowledge April, all you have to do is listen:

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

Mr. Ormsby’s Readings column appears each Wednesday. He can be reached at eormsby@nysun.com