I have just been listening to 'In Our Time' on Radio 4. In it Melvyn Bragg invited a couple of 'experts' to discuss 'The Waste Land by T S Eliot. It spurred me to make a few comments of my own which I have held for years, but never expressed.

After more than eighty years of this poem's existence and endless academic analysis, what their observations amounted to was that they didn't know what the poem was about. Having said this they still ended by muttering how important it was and that it laid the basis of the important Modernist movement. Doesn't this just illustrate how willing we are to accord spurious value to unintelligible rubbish and look on in awe at high culture which we cannot understand, but we are sure is really important and wonderful if ever we could just manage to penetrate it.

When Eliot was nearing completion of the poem he told prospective publishers, and anybody else who would listen, that it was a very great work which would shake the literary world. Eliot was a genuine lover of words and language and he had the ability to produce lines that flow beautifully and remain well in the memory. He exploited this skill to produce work that was very readable in parts although containing nothing of any worth at all in terms of meaning. At the same time he did include some of his misogyny and racism in the meaningless drivel of casual observations and mental ramblings.

Eliot himself was contradictory about the poem. On at least one occasion he said that it was of no real worth and that it contained only thirty good lines. That was a moment of honesty and clarity.

Eliot was a depressed man in a miserable marriage. He had very extreme political views which included despising Jews and seeing people like himself as the victim of strange conspiracies. He was reinforced in these unpleasant views of the world by his association with Ezra Pound, a sickening fascist who adored Mussolini and was also an anti-semite; probably more virulent than Eliot. Pound was a close confidant of Eliot and he contributed substantially in its completion and editing.

Eliot and Pound both considered themselves to be extremely well read and intelligent people who occupied a more refined strata of humanity than all those around them. They regarded a large proportion of humanity as unpleasant oiks who were not fit for culture and refinement.

The Waste Land and its unintelligible notes are actually a good reflection of the attitudes and perceptions of these two men. They were both extremely pretentious. They saw themselves as very well read members of an elite group above the mass. The Waste Land, like other works by both men, repeatedly uses literary references and other languages to no purpose other than to tell the reader that the author is very learned. The writings which Eliot describes as notes are actually nothing more than lines wanted by his publisher to pad the poem out to the length wanted for publication and further confusions intended to send the reader off on a wild goose chase of reading as they try to delve into the obscure 'meaning' of the poem.

What should we think of the Waste Land now? Enjoy the sound of those parts of it which are pleasant to the ear. Make no attempt at all to analyse or dissect it. Let its inadequate and unattractive author be seen for person he was and stop feeding his own delusions of being a class above the rest of us if not part of a mythical master race.