A hundred years ago The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot appeared in print. It captured the spiritual and cultural depravity that became a defining element of the modern, post-war age that Eliot belonged to. Its context is multifaceted. It is influenced by the Great War that changed the world politically and socially. The poem thematically builds upon the destruction of modern cities, the rising sense of disillusionment, the acceleration in the movement of life, the disavowal of religious sentiment and the marked sense of futility and despair that dominated post-war Europe.
Moreover, Eliot’s personal life became part of the poem’s context. His unhappy marriage as well as a variety of physical and mental health concerns add to the poem’s morose sense of enervation. This much is commonly known about the poem. Yet it doesn’t suffice as an answer when one asks why The Waste Land remains so critically important even today. Surely its value is not merely owing to the poet’s excellent sense of self-expression. And while its context has been of great importance for all its readers and scholars alike, if all it offers is a poetic account of life in post-war Europe (as the sheer amount of historical and ethnographic analyses on it would suggest), then there is an immense amount of poetry belonging to the same decade that offer the same insight. Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly is a critique of modern life, and Yeats’ The Second Coming is often compared to The Waste Land in terms of its depiction of disillusionment of a society. One aspect of The Waste Land that distinguishes it from other poems of the period is not the poem’s ability to represent the past it belonged to but its astounding capacity to continue to represent the present. It is not just a poem that is important but one that is presently and continually important.
The Waste Land is representative of Eliot’s own conception of poetry. He notes in A
Note on War Poetry:
But the abstract conception
Of private experience at its greatest intensity
Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry,’
May be affirmed in verse.
And as he defines in Tradition and the Individual Talent, poetry is that which emerges from “a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all.” For Eliot, then, poetry is experiential: it is either of the “greatest intensity” or it gives voice to those experiences that are difficult to see or explain. The Waste Land is an experiential poem in both of these ways. The fragmentation captures what the coherent fullness of direct expression could not. It is the poem’s fragmentation that enlarges it. The montage of various conversations, voices, allusions, scenes and languages puts together an all too large and full of noise world into a singular yet overwhelming experience for its readers. Eliot conceives the world as disarrayed and in such a world, boundaries and margins dissipate. The use of allusion in the poem paradoxically captures the amalgamation of cultures, histories, and traditions through their disintegration. You find images from Greek mythology and Sanskrit texts juxtaposed with writers from the Western canon such as Dante, Marvell, and Shakespeare. The allusions move through the text and into each other, achieving their meaning through their relation to each other. The poem even concludes in such a collation as in “The Fire Sermon”, Eliot places the allusion of the Buddhist fire sermon side by side with the allusion to St. Augustine’s Confessions:
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest burning.
Thus, in the poem, meaning is neither static nor permanent. It is transient, continually changing as our experiences of the world change. Whether we find the poem’s feeling of exhaustion and its dry and desolate imagery of death as an important parallel to our collective lives during the pandemic or find something personal and intimate in the poem’s depiction of deteriorating modern relationships, what the poem has to say seems to alter itself to meet our needs. It meets us halfway. The Waste Land is a postcard of the past and the present.
It would be a mistake or a severe injustice to only read The Waste Land from one approach, one direction, or one interpretation. Critics have attempted to read it from the point of view of the Great War alone. Or they have tried to discover Eliot’s biography through the poem. And the mistake we, as readers, are prone to making: trying to discover a singular meaning by understanding the poem’s references and allusions alone, as if there is a fixed meaning there to be excavated. In Eliot’s own Notes on ‘The Waste Land’, one finds some annotations to suggest that the meaning is not within the allusion. For example, for the lines 199-201, “O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter…” Eliot states, “I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.” These singularly focused critical approaches to the text are not incorrect, but rather inappropriate. They do not do The Waste Land justice, nor do they reveal to us the true significance of the poem. Eliot, too, pushed against such readings of the poem. He declared at a lecture at Harvard that the poem is nothing but “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.” To understand The Waste Land, one must look simultaneously outwards into the world and inwards into our own subjectivities and find the poem to reflect, significantly, our grouse against life.
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