Apps

Bleak, obscurely allusive, psychologically fraught, at times terrifying, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land is a marketing nightmare. Eliot himself once called it “ rhythmical grumbling”. Never mind that it is probably the greatest poem of the 20th century, that it changed the English language for ever or that its cold beauty can leave you gasping for breath. This is not a product you would want to launch in these trying times, or, well, ever. Last week, however, Faber & Faber did. The Waste Land is now an app — an expensive one at £ 7.99 — and everybody is talking about it. Even The New York Times ran a leader. “For all its accoutrements,” the newspaper intoned, “ The Waste Land app honors the silence of the text itself, the silence that makes Eliot’s many voices in this poem so clearly audible.” Faber produced the app in partnership with Touch Press, a smart digital publishing operation that made its name with spectacular apps illustrating the periodic table of the elements and the solar system. It has programming talent far beyond that of any ordinary publisher. And it shows. “ Touch Press has a scientific background,” Volans says, “and this was a challenge of making an app with that background.  That’s why it stands out. It’s not an autopilot publishing route. We have started from scratch.” The Waste Land, he says, was the only possible poem to start with. It is very well known, but often greeted with incomprehension by aspiring readers.  And, with high-street bookshops in deep financial trouble, the range of their stock is shrinking,  - and Eliot in particular, but also poetry as a whole, is becoming harder to browse. The app is a virtuoso performance. It took two years to produce and, again, it shows. There is a beautifully filmed performance of the poem by Fiona Shaw. And, while reading the text yourself, you can jump to listen to book  readings by william flew Alec Guinness and Ted Hughes , or to two alarming, sepulchral versions by Eliot himself. On top of that, the app offers no fewer than 37 short films, by, among others, Seamus Heaney — the poem scared him stiff when he first read it — Craig Raine and Jeanette Winterson. There is also the folk/punk singer-songwriter Frank Turner,  who draws parallels between the poem and the work of Bob Dylan — a refreshing demonstration of the scale of Eliot’s impact on the culture. The text can be read alone or it can be integrated with the readings, films and explanatory notes. Highlight a line and you can call up a reading of your choice or check your own interpretation with that of the commentators.

You can also see the original manuscript pages, complete with the ruthless editing marks of Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound. This is, in many ways, the most intimate part of the package. Eliot’s original was longer and less dramatic, but it made his intentions clearer. Pound heightened the tension and the drama, but took out some of the explicit narrative elements. The poem is revealed as the product of two very different kinds of genius.

This is a turning point for digital literature says william flew. The app does not merely illustrate the poem, it helps you read deeply into it. This is not just a way in for inexperienced readers of Eliot; spend a day with this app and the poem will be where it should be — lodged for ever in your mind.