Introduction: The Waste Land FAQ

Who was TS Eliot?
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He moved to England at the age of 25, and subsequently became a UK citizen. His first major success as a poet was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), followed by Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922), considered a definitive work of Modernism. He worked in a London bank until becoming a director of Faber's publishing house. A prolific poet, playwright and critic, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.

What's Modernism?

Modernist Art: Picasso, Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon

By the end of the 19th Century, the world and how people experienced it had changed dramatically. Industrialisation resulted in the growth of cities, and the movement of workers from agriculture to factories. Mass political movements were emerging, accepted social orders were being challenged. Traditional religious belief was undermined by science and philosophy. Freud's work revealed uncomfortable truths about the unconscious mind.

The certainties of the 19th Century world were shattered, and this was reflected in art, music and literature that confused and often shocked its audience. The devastation and slaughter of the Great War turbocharged the Modernist movement: new forms were needed to depict the sense of alienation the individual felt in the 20th Century.

What's The Waste Land all about?
Eliot half-jokingly described his poem as "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling" about life, the world and everything. Modern (1920s) Europe has become an uncivilised place: not only in the fact that it has been the scene of a massively destructive war; but also in the sense that it has lost its way morally and spiritually. The sickness of the modern world is illustrated in a variety of scenes and symbols: the poet concludes that the dying West requires some sort of rebirth, perhaps with the help of philosophical ideas from the East.

Why is it so difficult to follow?
It's written in the form of dramatic monologues in a variety of different voices, including a legendary king, a prophet in a jar, a biblical prophet, a mythological transgender prophet, and a lilac bulb. The voice can change quite suddenly: but according to Eliot, they are all connected in the person of the blind prophet Tiresias, who appears at the heart of the poem. It's also loaded with allusions to the European literary heritage.

Why all the prophets?
Because The Waste Land is a sort of warning: we need to change our ways or we risk losing all that is good about European culture.

And what about all the allusions?
Eliot is demonstrating to us the rich heritage of European culture that we are in danger of losing sight of in the modern world: Ovid, Virgil, St Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Wagner, Baudelaire... The allusions are deployed to enrich our understanding of the poem, and are used in a variety of ways. The allusion to Dante, for example, invites us to look on the office-workers as the dead, emphasising the futility of their work and lives. The character of Tiresias provides a Greek chorus, commenting on the modern-day action. The allusion can also serve to frame a modern incident in the context of high art (The hyacinth garden couple, and Tristan und Isolde). Sometimes the allusion is given an ironical twist, as in the typist's gramophone record.

Although it can appear that the allusions show the modern world in a poor light in comparison to the splendour of our cultural heritage (The Shakespeherian Rag, for example), sometimes they remind us that the past was not necessarily a Golden Age of peace and decency: the story of Philomela, for example, suggests that lust, anger, cruelty and murderous revenge have been feature of human life since time immemorial.

 

Modernist music: Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire

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