T. S.

Eliot’s Modernism in TheWaste Land

Asha F. Solomon
Department off English,Montfort College, Lucknow

ABSTRACT

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England
family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne,
Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a
schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber &
Faber. Later, he became a director of this famous publishing house.During the seventeen years
of its publication (1922-1939), he edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion.
In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.
Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of the twentieth-century poetry. Never
compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief
that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language
and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his
influence on modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliot is a poet from the Modernist period,
which is from around World War I to World War II. The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece,
is a long, complex poem about the psychological and cultural crisis that came with the loss of
moral and cultural identity after World War I. When it was first published, the poem was
considered radically experimental. Eliot dispenses with traditional verse form. He presents
sordid images of popular culture with erudite allusions to classical and ancient literature and
myths. The title itself indicates Eliot’s attitude toward his contemporary society, as he uses the
idea of a dry and sterile wasteland as a metaphor for a Europe devastated by war and desperate
for spiritual replenishment.
The World War from 1914 to 1918 was a defining moment in the world history. It not only had a
lasting and profound effect on the literary sensibilities of a generation but also gave a new
dimension to theirsociety.The war brought about a greatsurge of literary output. Poets such as
Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Ivor Gurney created a new form of poetry, as they
attempted to give expression to the horrors of war. Literature became the key medium through
which the experience of modern warfare was articulated. Writers of the period were acutely
aware of the sense that they were significant agents of a modernist movement. Poets such as Ezra
Pound and TS Eliot, and writers such as James Joyce, DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, were
profoundly self-conscious about what they were trying to achieve.
In April 1914, just three months before the outbreak of war, a young American poet from
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Harvard arrived in England. TS Eliot was already emerging as a significant poetic presence,
having been identified by American poet Ezra Pound, who was to remain a close friend. In 1915
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his first significant poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, was published, but it was The
Waste Land, published in 1922, that Eliot is most known for. Widely regarded as the most
influential poem of the 20th century, the 432-line poem is a work steeped in the shadow of
World WarI. The title of the poem is an allusion to the devastation of the war and the poem
itself, a metaphor for the devastated landscape of post-war Europe.But the First World War also

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shaped literature in other ways. The evolution of “modernism” – the cultural and literary
movement that emerged in the early-20th century – was intimately bound up with the shock and
experience of the First World War.
Eliot‟s Waste Land is I think the justification of the „movement,‟ of our modern experiment,
since 1900,” wrote Ezra Pound shortly after the poem was published. T.S. Eliot‟s poem describes
a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the experience of the First World War and
from Eliot‟s personal painful experiences. Born in St. Louis, Eliot had studied at Harvard, the
Sorbonne, and Oxford before moving to London, where he completed his doctoral dissertation
on the philosopher F. H. Bradley. Because of the war, he was unable to return to the United
States to receive his degree. He taught grammar school briefly and then took a job at Lloyds
Bank, where he worked for eight years. Unhappily married, he suffered a breakdown soon after
the war and wrote most of The Waste Land while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne,
Switzerland, at the age of 33. Eliot later described the poem as “the relief of a personal and
wholly insignificant grouse against life…just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” Yet the poem
seemed to his contemporaries to transcend Eliot‟s personal situation and represent a general
crisis in western culture. One of its major themes is the barrenness of a post-war world in which
human sexuality has been perverted from its normal course and the natural world too has become
infertile.The poem is deliberately obscure and fragmentary, incorporating variant voices,
multiple points of view, and abrupt shifts in dramatic context. The motif of moral degeneration,
however, is prevalent throughout the poem, the premise being that contemporary Europe,
obsessed with novelty, trends, materialism, and instant gratification, lacks the faith and substance
to reaffirm its cultural heritage, to re-establish the sense of order and stability that historical
continuity once provided. In an attempt to counter the cultural deficit of the present with the rich
cultural heritage of the past, Eliot combines images from pagan rituals and religious texts with
ancient fertility rituals and allusions to legends of the Grail. These images of ceremony and
tradition are set against bleak images of modern life, where spiritual death breeds cultural death,
and the ashen landscape reflects a barren world void of transcendental value.
Early modernists had barely begun to attempt the use formal modernists‟ technique while The
Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist poetics, both for its broad
symbolic significance and for Eliot‟s masterful use of formal techniques. The critic 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 endeavour, and a
thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed.” Eliot later complained that
“approving critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed „the disillusionment of a generation,‟
which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but
that did not form part of my intention.” Nonetheless, it was as a representative of a postwar
generation that Eliot became famous. To compare Eliot‟s comments on the poem with the way it
was received illustrates strikingly the fact that, as William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put
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it, “The poem is not the critic‟s own and not the author‟s (it is detached from the author at birth
and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to
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the public.” The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of
verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire
culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential statement of that crisis and the epitome
of a modernist poem.

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'The Waste Land', one of his most influential works is commonly regarded as one of the most
important works of modernist literature. In the place of a traditional work, with unified themes
and a coherent structure, Eliot produced a poem that seemed to incorporate many unrelated,
little-known references to history, religion, mythology, and other disciplines. He even wrote
parts of the poem in foreign languages, such as Hindi. In fact the poem was so complex that Eliot
felt the need to include extensive notes identifying the sources to which he was alluding, a highly
unusual move for a poet, and a move that caused some critics to assert that Eliot was trying to be
deliberately obscure or was playing a joke on them. Yet, while the poem is obscure, critics have
identified several sources that inspired its creation and which have helped determine its meaning.
Many see the poem as a reflection of Eliot‟s disillusionment with the moral decay of post–World
War I Europe. In the work, this sense of disillusionment manifests itself symbolically through a
type of Holy Grail legend. Eliot cited two books from which he drew to create the poem‟s
symbolism: Jessie L. Weston‟s 'From Ritual to Romance' (1920) and Sir James G. Frazer‟s 'The
Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion' (1890). The 1922 version of 'The Waste Land'
was also significantly influenced by Eliot‟s first wife Vivien and by his friend Ezra Pound, who
helped Eliot edit the original 800-line draft down to the published 433 lines. The title of the
poem refers to a myth from 'From Ritual to Romance', in which Weston describes a kingdom
where the genitals of the king, known as the Fisher King, have been wounded in some way. This
injury, which affects the king‟s fertility, also mythically affects the kingdom itself. With its vital,
regenerative power gone, the kingdom has dried up and turned into a waste land. In order for the
land to be restored, a hero must complete several tasks, or trials. This ancient myth was the basis
for various other quest stories from many cultures, including the Christian quest for the Holy
Grail. Eliot says he drew heavily on this myth for his poem, and critics have noted that many of
the poem‟s references refer to this idea.
Scott-James, in his analysis of the poetry, is able to tell us what is not to be found in Eliot.
"There is no joy, no exultation, not even pleasure except the pleasure which is shown as
spurious. There is no portrayal of common emotions, except when they are depraved, or silly. All
the things which common men think of as practical and desirable vanish into insignificance
under his vision." And Wallace Fowlie tells us what can be discovered there: "More fervently
than any other poet of the twentieth century, Eliot has sung of the permanence of time, the
experience of one time which is all time. He sings of it when he speaks of the flower that fades,
of the sea that seems eternal, of the rock in the sea, and of the prayer of the Annunciation.... In
such [passages] the poet reveals his true mission, that of transmuting his intimate emotions, his
personal anguish, into a strange and impersonal work. In this way, the poet becomes aware of his
presence in the world, where his major victory is the imposing of his presence as a man by
means of his lucidity and his creative power."
Eliot‟s own analysis of Joyce‟s Ulysses, served as the most important model for The Waste
Land. Eliot‟s intentions in making a miniature epic out of the various lyrical moments and
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borrowed fragments make up the poem.He wrote that the parallels Joyce draws between his own
characters and those of Homer‟s Odyssey constitute a “mythical method,” which had “the
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importance of a scientific discovery.” He went so far as to compare Joyce to Einstein. The

mythical method, according to Eliot, “is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a
shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history.” Many of Joyce‟s readers have felt that Joyce himself did not necessarily aim for control

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and order, but most are in agreement that Eliot‟s essay describes well the intention of The Waste
Land, in which the many parallels that have been briefly discussed here help to convert chaos
into a kind of order.Eliot shows that communication is the key to keeping the world from
becoming a Waste Land, and that it is the only thing that can save it. Eliot uses speech and
failure of speech to give the image of the poem a positive connotation. The way that Eliot
presents this theme in the poem is positive because he shows that speech and communication are
important.
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. Thismadeartists 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 War, causing a general crisis of
masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place in a changed society. 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 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.”

REFERENCES

i. Bergenzi, Bernard. T. S. Eliot, Collier Books, New York New York, 1972
ii. Cuddy, Lois A., and David H. Hirsch, eds. Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot, The Waste
Land. G. K. Hall & Co., 1991.
iii. Kenner, Hugh, ed. T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice Hall Inc., 1962.
iv. Martin, Graham. ed. Eliot in perspective. Humanities Press, 1970.
v. Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice.University of California Press, 1988.
vi. Unger, Leonard. T. S. Eliot. University of Minnesota Press, 1970.
vii. Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-
151.
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