T.
S. Eliot, the author of The Waste Land , was born on 26 September 1888 at St Louis ,
Missouri and died on 4 January 1965 in London . He married
Vivienne Haigh-Wood, June 1915. After her emotional and physical health
deteriorated in the early 1920s, Eliot separated from Vivienne, avoiding her all
but once, until her death at Northumberland
Mental Hospital
Eliot probably worked on the text
that became The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in
1922. In a letter to New York
lawyer and patron of modernism John Quinn dated 9 May 1921, Eliot wrote that he
had a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish. Richard
Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that a year or so before Eliot read him the
manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London ,
Eliot visited him in the country. While walking through a graveyard, they
discussed Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Aldington writes:
“I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went
on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray
evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might
achieve a similar success.”
Eliot, having been diagnosed with
some form of nervous disorder, had been recommended rest, and applied for three
months’ leave from the bank where he was employed; the reason stated on his
staff card was nervous breakdown. He and his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood
Eliot, travelled to the coastal resort of Margate
for a period of convalescence. While there, Eliot worked on the poem, and
possibly showed an early version to Ezra Pound.
The Waste Land United Kingdom
in the October issue of 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 cruelest month", "I will show you fear
in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih
shantih shantih".
Eliot's poem loosely follows the
legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of
contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural
allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. Because of
this, critics and scholars regard the poem as obscure. The poem shifts between
voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker,
location and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and
literatures.
It 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 forms and instead juxtaposes sordid images of popular culture with erudite allusions to classical and ancient literature and myths. The title is indicative of Eliot’s attitude toward his contemporary society, as he uses the idea of a dry and sterile wasteland as a metaphor for a
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 reestablish 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.
Describing a series of failed
encounters between various men and women, Eliot creates composites of fertility
archetypes that ironically are incapable of offering spiritual nourishment to a
dying world. The characters drift in and out of meaningless relationships; the
men and women are impotent, shallow, vain and excruciatingly ordinary. Culture
is reduced to common clichés; the well of redemption becomes a “dull canal.”
The world is filled with “a heap of broken images” where “the dead tree gives
no shelter.” The only salvation appears to be in personal responsibility, self-control,
and a faith in cultural continuity based on common Western European values.
The poem is an elitist document. Eliot
provides copious footnotes, and the text is loaded with difficult literary, historical,
and anthropological allusions; it is meant to be understood only by a few. As
an account of the dilemma faced by the West of its being threatened by the loss
of its privileged, white, patriarchal position of cultural dominance in the
first half of the twentieth century, The Waste Land is indispensable.
The poem's structure is divided
into five sections: The first section, The Burial of the Dead introduces the
diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, A Game of Chess
employs vignettes of several characters—alternating narrations—that address
those themes experientially. The Fire Sermon, the third section, offers a
philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial
in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After
a fourth section, Death by Water, that includes a brief lyrical petition, the
culminating fifth section, What the Thunder Said concludes with an image of
judgment.
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
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 is the shortest section which describes a dead Phoenician
lying in the water—perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom Madame Sosostris
spoke.
The last section, ‘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
The Wasteland is a seminal poem. You'll
find a reference to it everywhere and anywhere. Eliot brings the theme of
futility, frustration, spiritual and physical barrenness into poetry with the
use of varied symbols, myths, allusions, and imagery. It is not just the theme
of death-in-life but its mode of representation that makes the poem a masterpiece.
Often called as a 'heap of broken images' for its fragmented narration, the
poem has allusions ranging from Christian to Greek to Hindu mythology, which
are presented with the help of symbols. It is the abundant and obscure
references that make the poem a difficult read. But once the references are
clear, the poem becomes both entertaining and enlightening.
Eliot brings the chaos of the
modern civilization into his narrative structure, but he also shows a ray of
hope to come out of the decay. The protagonist of the poem, Tiersias is a
soothsayer from Greek legend, who narrates to the readers the situation of the
Wasteland. He is the grail bearer who can rescue the wastelanders from the
moral, spiritual, sexual decay they are going through.
The title of the poem can also be
taken as the wasteland of self, where man has become mechanical to his needs. There
are constant references to incest, homosexuality, flesh trade, adultery, and
sexual perversion. It is a wasteland where everything has lost its meaning. There
are no values, no code of conducts, no hope, and no escape. The picture of
nullity, nothingness, death in life, meaninglessness and aimlessness can be
read in these lines:
'What shall I do now? What shall
I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk
the street
With my hair down, so what shall
we do
Tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?
The hot water at ten and if it
rains a closed car at four
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting
for a knock upon
The door. (A Game of Chess, 131-140)
It is in this situation, the
protagonist of the poem, Tiersias, asks the readers a rhetorical question:
What are the roots that clutch, what
branches
Grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of
man. (The Burial of the Dead, 18-20)
There is a type of critical
anxiety which lurches from blurred close readings of individual texts to
citations of authors from the literary canon who seem to be saying something
similar. But Craig Raine's new study of TS Eliot aims to be more than a series
of myopic readings. He states in his preface that his theme is that 'the Buried
Life, the idea of a life not fully lived, is the central, animating idea' of
Eliot's poetry. The idea is taken from Matthew Arnold's poem 'The Buried Life',
which he quotes from 72 pages later:
'Alas! Is even love too weak
To unlock the heart and let it
speak?
Are even lovers powerless to
reveal
To one another what indeed they
feel?'
The problem with these belated
questions is that they ask the critic of Eliot to look closely at his life and,
in particular, his failed marriage to his first wife, the fascist Vivienne
Haigh-Wood, who joined the Blackshirts and worshipped Oswald Mosley. Looking at
his close readings, one finds that they are not really close at all, but simple
assertions about Eliot's lines bringing the world 'indelibly before us' and
being 'drenched in desire, rapt with repetition'. In short, The Waste Land is a
masterpiece and there is much in it for modern critics and research scholars.
Jamshed Gill
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