THE WASTE LAND
T.S ELLIOT
Summary
The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter”). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader “something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a “hyacinth girl” and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.
Modernist writers proclaimed a
new "subject matter" for literature and they felt that their new way
of looking at life required a new form, a new way of writing. Writers of this
period tend to pursue more experimental and usually more highly individualistic
forms of writing. The sense of a changing world was stimulated by radical new
developments
.
Experimentation with genre and
form was yet another defining characteristic of Modernist literature. Perhaps
the most representative example of this experimental mode is T. S. Eliot’s long
poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often single out The Waste Land as the
definitive sample of Modernist literature. In it, one is confronted by
biblical-sounding verse forms, quasi-conversational interludes, dense and
frequent references which frustrate even the most well-read readers, and
sections that resemble prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully
displays all the conventions which one expects in Modernist literature. There
is the occupation with self and inwardness, the loss of traditional structures
to buttress the ego against shocking realities, and a fluid nature to truth and
knowledge
