A student at Illinois Wesleyan University recently confessed to holding a morbid fear of parked cars. He said, “I’m terribly afraid one of them will roll right over me” (Hamel). The actual odds of a parked car suddenly rolling over him are extremely slim; however, that does not alleviate his fears. It takes this poor boy a great amount of personal will power just to walk across a street where there are parked cars.As senseless as a fear of parked cars may be, people constantly allow their lives to be manipulated through fears. Political figures fret for days, sometimes weeks, over the wording of a tiny passage from their acceptance speech; poets spend decades of their lives search for that one word to give an infinite amount of meaning to a poem no one will ever read; and authors hold back some of their most inventive creations due to fear of public response. The key is that people must be willing to set aside public opinion and write of the things in their hearts. Into the Waste LandIn 1922, T. S. Eliot published a poem that sent critics into a fury. Attacking everything from structure to meaning, the public response was a far cry from good. However, this poem went on to become regarded as the most influential English poem of the twentieth century. The poem was entitled “The Waste Land”.Eliot was not without reservation in writing his poem, however. When first written, he was so displeased with the result that he scrapped the bulk of the poem. It wasn’t until several years later, not to mention several drafts later, that he was content enough to publish (Eliot, 35).How would modern poetry be different had Eliot not released “The Waste Land”? What would poets today be writing if Eliot had let his fears of public rejection persuade him not publish? It is not as if Eliot couldn’t have known how his poem would be received. A variation upon a theme is accepted; total rew...
