XIII-Analysis of a Modern American Work: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

1. 1-Form and Content of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

     T. S. Eliot’s landmark modernist poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Divided into five sections, the poem explores life in London in the aftermath of the First World War, although its various landscapes include the desert and the ocean as well as the bustling metropolis. The poem is notable for its unusual style, which fuses different poetic forms and traditions. Eliot also alludes to numerous works of literature including the Bible, Shakespeare, St Augustine, Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts, as well as French poetry, Wagnerian opera, and Arthurian legend surrounding the Holy Grail. But the poem is also strikingly modern in its references.

Eliot organized The Waste Land into five distinct sections, each of which bears its own title:

     1.    “The Burial of the Dead” (lines 1–76)
     2.    “A Game of Chess” (lines 77–172)
     3.    “The Fire Sermon” (lines 173–311)
     4.    “Death by Water” (lines 312–21)
     5.    “What the Thunder Said” (lines 322–433)

      Eliot indicates that he derived “the plan” of the poem from a contemporary work of anthropology that analyzes medieval legends of the Holy Grail. This claim led many early critics to seek out a meaningful sense of wholeness in what otherwise appears to be “a heap of broken images” (Eliot 22). However, more recent scholars have closely analyzed the poem’s compositional process, and they have concluded that, contrary to his statement, Eliot didn’t write the poem to a predetermined “plan.” Instead, the poem’s five-part structure emerged as a part of the process of composition, much like a collage slowly emerges as various bits and pieces are made to fit together. The structure of the poem results primarily from Eliot’s strategies of fragmentation and juxtaposition. He uses these strategies to reflect an overarching sense that modern life is unfolding in the shattered ruins of civilization. (Sparknotes)

Major Themes

The Barrenness of Modern Life

      The Waste Land offers a profound reflection on the barrenness of modern life. In Eliot’s imagining, World War I had damaged Western civilization, reducing it to a smoking ruin. This damage shattered the cultural and aesthetic inheritances of the Western tradition and effectively halted social and economic development. The result was a metaphorical barrenness that affected all levels of life and culture. Eliot represents this barrenness most centrally through the well-known figure of the Fisher King. According to Arthurian legend, the Fisher King comes last in a long line of British kings charged with the responsibility of guarding the Holy Grail. As Britain’s protector, he is also the symbolic embodiment of its land. However, the Fisher King has sustained a sexual wound that makes him impotent and renders his entire kingdom barren. In Eliot’s hands, he becomes the poster child for modernity’s impotence. (Sparknotes)

The Failure of Language to Communicate Properly

       In a world shattered by political violence, institutional collapse, and ideological instability, language loses its capacity to communicate as it once did. Eliot reflects on the failure of language to communicate properly in several ways. Perhaps the most straightforward example occurs in “A Game of Chess,” when the anonymous wealthy woman pleads with her lover to tell her what he’s thinking (Eliot 111–14).

       Language also fails to communicate properly because it has become too multiple. This abundance results in part from Eliot’s use of hundreds of references and quotations from a plurality of literary, historical, and religious contexts. The poem’s multiplicity also results from the way it speaks in different languages. For one thing, the poem features numerous speakers, though because the distinctions between them aren’t always clear, it’s not always obvious who is communicating what to whom. For another thing, the poem literally communicates in a range of different languages, including English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, and Sanskrit. (Sparknotes)

The Irreversibility of Decline

     Eliot’s vision in The Waste Land reflects a world in irreversible decline. References to death and dying are frequent in the poem, starting with the title of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” which relates to the burial rites of the Anglican Church. The poem also features numerous images of bones, and the fourth section, “Death by Water,” focuses on a drowned sailor. There are also many oblique allusions to death, dying, and even suicide.

The Torment and Comfort of Memory

      The work of memory is central to The Waste Land, and it involves equal measures of torment and comfort. Eliot indicates as much in the poem’s opening lines, where April “mix[es] / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain” (Eliot 2–4). Here, the speaker sets up an opposition between memory and desire: memory is associated with the past, and desire with the future. Yet memory and desire are further linked, respectively, with “dull roots” and “spring rain.”

      For a poet like Eliot, the work of memory inevitably relates to literary and cultural tradition. Here, too, memory is both a torment and a comfort. For many, the First World War threw the authority of cultural and political institutions into question, effectively shattering the traditions that had previously felt so sustaining.

Theme	Description
Fragmentation and decay	Enacted through the poem’s use of free verse (especially in ‘What the Thunder Said’) and its references to ‘fragments’ and ‘broken images’
Sex and relationships	Seen in the conversation in the London pub at the end of ‘A Game of Chess’, the section describing the typist and ‘young man carbuncular’ in ‘The Fire Sermon’, and the Earl of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth I (the ‘Virgin Queen’), among others
War	See the poem’s references to an ‘archduke’ (suggesting Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination caused the outbreak of WWI), rats, dead men and their bones, demobbed soldiers, and possible shell-shock victims (the man in the middle section of ‘A Game of Chess’)

 

2. 2-Features of Modernism in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Characteristics of the modernist literature in the Waste Land:

•  The Waste Land made a tremendous impact on the post war generation, and is considered one of the most important documents of the modern age.
• The poem is difficult to understand in detail, but its general aim is clear. Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, it presents modern London as an arid, waste land.
• The poem is built round the symbols of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth, and this fundamental idea is referred to throughout.

·         In a series of disconcertingly vivid impression, the poem progress by rather abrupt transition through five sections.

The Waste Land as a modernist text is observed through many aspects which are as follows:-

  Fragmentation and Metaphor

      T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships in the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world. By scanning the whole poem, incoherence is clearly found within its four sections. (Singh 5)

   Use of Allusions

      Allusions are an interesting feature of modernist literary works because the modernists believed in Ezra Pound's motto “make it new”. Allusion and obscurity to describe an image of the physical desolation of the society that was torn and devastated out of the War and he also tries to transfer a kind of spiritual disappointment and despair. As Eric Svarny argues that, the dry, barren, lifeless images in the poem form an “evocation of post-war London”. Eliot makes wide ranging allusions across literatures and legends of various ages and cultures,  ranging from The Bible, Sappho, Catullus, Pervigilium Veneris, Aeneid, Metamorphoses, Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Spenser’s Prothalamion, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, Middleton, Webster, Donne, Byron, Joseh Campbell, Wagner, Tennyson, Walter Pater, Baudelaire, Rupert Brooke, Walt Whitman, Theophile Gautier, Apollinaire, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Yeats (Singh 5). These allusions add symbolic weight to the poems contemporary material, to encourage free association and to establish a tone of pastiche, seeming to collect all the shards of an exhausted civilization into one huge patchwork of modern existence.

 Symbolism

      Eliot's The Waste Land can be observed as a window to modern literature in a sense that it represents the ultimate application of the norms of one of the movements that appeared in that century, which is the French Symbolist Movement as suggested by most critics including Dr. Rakesh. In his, book T.S. Eliot: An Evaluation of his Poetry, Ramji Lall argues that The Waste Land is a symbolist poem saying: Intimately related to this aspect of The Waste Land is its quality as a symbolist poem, where there is much suggestion and implication, and many hints of possible meanings, but where nothing stated with absolute finality.

 Imagism

     Eliot’s The Waste Land can be observed as a modernist text in a sense that it represents the ultimate application of the norms of the movements that appeared in the century. There is a movement led by Ezra Pound which is known as IMAGISM. This movement emphasizes the use of images in literary works. It is clear that The Waste Land is full of images; not only this but also it is wholly based on images. The poem is full of images and allusions, which has been a trend in the twentieth century not only by Eliot and Pound but also by so many others like Yeats and Joyce. In brief, it can be said that the poem represent the common trend of the twentieth century in terms of images and allusions. (Singh 6)

 Meaninglessness of Relationships

      In a modernist literature society that lacks hope and a sense of significance, many aspects of life lose their meaning and are reduced to trivial things. In the Waste Land, relationships between people in the modern society are reduced to something that is sterile, lifeless, and dry. The various characters that appear in the poem are unable to carry a logical and coherent dialogue. This impossibility of meaningful communication corresponds to the dismal and hopeless reality of the modern society and also intensifies and dramatizes the speaker’s anguish and frustration at world.

 Modern Themes of The Waste Land

      T.S. Eliot expertly uses various themes and motifs in his poem to present the kind of society after World War I in modernist time. Themes are related to lust, death, rebirth, the seasons, love, water, history, The damaged psyche of humanity, and the changing nature of gender roles. The Waste Land embodies other common themes of the modern literary tradition, such as the disjoint nature of time, the role of culture versus nationality, and the desire to find universality in a period of political unrest. The poem also has a number of recurring themes, most of which are pairs of binary oppositions such as sight/blindness, resurrection/death, fertility/ impotency, civilization / decline and voice/silence. Thus, the poem is a glimpse of the collective psyche following the World War I and an aesthetic experience exemplary of the Modernist literary tradition. I A Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavor”, and a thirst for life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed. (Singh 5-10)

 

Feature of Modern Poetry	Explanation	Examples from The Waste Land
Fragmentation	Modern poetry often presents a disjointed or broken structure, reflecting the fractured modern world.	The poem is divided into five sections with abrupt shifts in voice, setting, and perspective.
Allusion and Intertextuality	Heavy use of references to classical, religious, literary, and historical texts.	Allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Dante, Hindu texts, and more throughout the poem.
Multiple Voices and Perspectives	Use of many different speakers and points of view to reflect the multiplicity of modern experience.	Shifting personas, such as Tiresias, the typist, and various unnamed narrators.
Myth and Symbol	Reliance on mythological frameworks to give structure and meaning to a disordered world.	The Grail legend, the Fisher King, and fertility myths structure much of the poem's symbolism.
Disillusionment and Alienation	Themes reflect post-war disillusionment, loss of faith, and a sense of isolation.	Lines like “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” convey despair and fragmentation of belief.
Experimentation with Form and Style	Breaks with traditional poetic meter and rhyme; includes free verse and collage-like structure.	Use of irregular stanza forms, free verse, and sudden shifts in language and tone.
Urban Imagery and Modern Landscape	Focus on the bleakness and spiritual emptiness of modern city life.	References to London as an "Unreal City"; images of crowds, fog, and monotony.
Use of Multiple Languages	Incorporation of different languages to reflect cultural complexity and eroded coherence.	Passages in German, French, Sanskrit, Latin, and Italian.
Irony and Paradox	Use of irony to highlight contradictions and complexity of modern existence.	Contradictory statements like “April is the cruellest month.”