About the author: The Waste Land is a poem by T. S.Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922.
Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih".
Eliot's poem combines the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism, and the Hindu Upanishads.
The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.
“The Waste Land'' is divided into five sections under the title :
(I) The Burial of the Dead.
(II) A Game of Chess.
(III) The fire Sermon.
(IV) Death by water
(V) What the Thunder Said.
Themes :
The Damaged Psyche of Humanity :
Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War I challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet capable of changing the world through verse.
Modernist writers wanted to capture their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured, alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an entire generation of young men to the horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place in a radically altered society.
As for England, the aftershocks of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution of the British Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) demonstrates this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular Speaker wonders whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to keep living.
Humanity’s collectively damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with one another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including “A Game of Chess” (the second part of The Waste Land) and “The Hollow Men.”
The Power of Literary History :
Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary Canon, and he packed his work full of Allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly Exegeses.
In “The Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay first published in 1919, Eliot praises the literary tradition and states that the best writers are those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers who came before, as if all of literature constituted a stream in which each new writer must enter and swim.
Only the very best new work will subtly shift the stream’s current and thus improve the literary tradition. Eliot also argued that the literary past must be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most essential bits of the past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers.
The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination of society and humanity.
The Changing Nature of Gender Roles :
Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian Era of the nineteenth century, women were confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical atmosphere dictated most social interactions.
Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 helped usher in a new era of excess and forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910. World War I, from 1914 to 1918, further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly alienated from one another and empowered to break social mores.
English women began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in 1918, and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol in public. Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could afford it continued their education at those universities that began accepting women in the early twentieth century.
Modernist writers created gay and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug off rather than as absolute identities dictated by society.
Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms inherent in the modern age.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reflects the feelings of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from World War I to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners. Prufrock, unable to make a decision, watches women wander in and out of a room, “talking of Michelangelo” (14), and elsewhere admires their downy, bare arms. A disdain for unchecked sexuality appears in both “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1918) and The Waste Land. The latter portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive sexuality.
Nevertheless, the poem’s central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphrodite—and his powers of prophesy and transformation are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias, Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together in one body.
Character List :
The Narrator :
The most difficult to describe of the poem's characters, he assumes many different shapes and guises. At times the Narrator seems to be Eliot himself; at other times he stands in for all humanity. In "The Fire Sermon" he is at one point the Fisher King of the Grail legend, at another the blind prophet Tiresias. When he seems to reflect Eliot, the extent to which his ruminations are autobiographical is ambiguous.
Madame Sosostris :
A famous clairvoyant referred to in Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow and borrowed by Eliot for the Tarot card episode. She suffers from a bad cold, but is nonetheless "known to be the wisest woman in Europe, / With a wicked pack of cards."
Stetson :
A friend of the Narrator's, who fought in the war with him. Which war? It is unclear. Perhaps the Punic War or World War I, or both, or neither.
The Rich Lady :
Never referred to by name, she sits in the resplendent drawing room of "A Game of Chess." She seems to be surrounded by luxury, but unable to appreciate or enjoy it. She might allude to Eliot's wife Vivienne.
Philomela
A character from Ovid's Metamorphoses. She was raped by Tereus, then, after taking her vengeance with her sister, morphed into a nightingale.
A Typist :
Lonely, a creature of the modern world. She is visited by a "young man carbuncular," who sleeps with her. She is left alone again, accompanied by just her mirror and a gramophone.
Mr. Eugenides :
A merchant from Smyrna (now Izmir, in Turkey). Probably the one-eyed merchant to whom Madame Sosostris refers.
Phlebas
A Phoenician merchant who is described lying dead in the water in "Death by Water." Perhaps the same drowned Phoenician sailor to whom Madame Sosostris refers.
Main idea of motif :
Fragmentation :
Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another.
In Eliot’s view, humanity’s psyche had been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire. Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and Tones within one poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanity’s damaged psyche and the modern world, with its barrage sensory perceptions. Critics read the following line from The Waste Land as a statement of Eliot’s poetic project: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (431).
Practically every line in The Waste Land echoes an academic work or canonical literary text, and many lines also have long footnotes written by Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and to encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper into his sources. These echoes and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot includes only parts, rather than whole texts from the Canon. Using these fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition, as well as to place his ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of history.
Mythic and Religious Ritual :
Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot explains the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy.
The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land.
Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems take their images almost exclusively from Christianity, such as the echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men” and the retelling of the story of the wise men in “Journey of the Magi” (1927).
Infertility :
Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope with either reproductive or nonreproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game of Chess” represent an out-of-control sexuality.
World War I not only eradicated an entire generation of young men in Europe but also ruined the land. Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two primary methods by which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus and carnage.
In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker discusses the dead land, now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised hands, stiffened from rigor mortis. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speaker’s mind to become infertile: his head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts.
Summary :
The poem begins with a section entitled "The Burial of the Dead." In it, the narrator -- perhaps a representation of Eliot himself -- describes the seasons. Spring brings "memory and desire," and so the narrator's memory drifts back to times in Munich, to childhood sled rides, and to a possible romance with a "hyacinth girl."
The memories only go so far, however. The narrator is now surrounded by a desolate land full of "stony rubbish."
He remembers a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris who said he was "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" and that he should "fear death by water."
Next he finds himself on London Bridge, surrounded by a crowd of people. He spots a friend of his from wartime, and calls out to him.
The next section, "A Game of Chess," transports the reader abruptly from the streets of London to a gilded drawing room, in which sits a rich, jewel-bedecked lady who complains about her nerves and wonders what to do. The poem drifts again, this time to a pub at closing time in which two Cockney women gossip. Within a few stanzas, we have moved from the upper crust of society to London's low-life.
"The Fire Sermon" opens with an image of a river. The narrator sits on the banks and muses on the deplorable state of the world. As Tiresias, he sees a young "carbuncular" man hop into bed with a lonely female typist, only to aggressively make love to her and then leave without hesitation.
The poem returns to the river, where maidens sing a song of lament, one of them crying over her loss of innocence to a similarly lustful man.
"Death by Water," the fourth section of the poem, describes a dead Phoenician lying in the water -- perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom Madame Sosostris spoke.
"What the Thunder Said" shifts locales from the sea to rocks and mountains. The narrator cries for rain, and it finally comes. The thunder that accompanies it ushers in the three-pronged dictum sprung from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata": to give, to sympathize, to control.
With these commandments, benediction is possible, despite the collapse of civilization that is under way -- "London bridge is falling down falling down falling down."
