Waste Land

By T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis.
He was the son of a prominent industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family.
Eliot always felt the loss of his familys New England roots and seemed to be somewhat
ashamed of his fathers business success; throughout his life he continually sought to return to
the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by attending Harvard and then by emigrating to
England, where he lived from 1914 until his death. Eliot began graduate study in philosophy at
Harvard and completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of World War I prevented him
from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though, Eliot had already
written The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and the War, which kept him in England, led him
to decide to pursue poetry full-time.
Eliot met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound who was his main mentor and
editor and who got his poems published and noticed. During a 1921 break from his job as a bank
clerk (to recover from a mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame,
The Waste Land. This poem, heavily edited by Pound and perhaps also by Eliots wife, Vivien,
addressed the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these
fragments to create a new kind of poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to write
criticism, partly in an effort to explain his own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the
publishing house Faber & Faber. Despite the distraction of his wifes increasingly serious bouts
of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the preeminent literary figure in the
English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental that younger poets often went out of
their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of style.
Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to
Anglicanism. His poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never
becomes dogmatic the way his sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. Four Quartets,
his last major poetic work, combines a Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting
from the wars devastation of Europe. Eliot died in 1965 in London.
Analysis
Eliot attributed a great deal of his early style to the French SymbolistsRimbaud,
Baudelaire, Mallarm, and Laforguewhom he first encountered in college, in a book by Arthur
Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. It is easy to understand why a young
aspiring poet would want to imitate these glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect
on his poetry is perhaps less profound than he claimed. While he took from them their ability to
infuse poetry with high intellectualism while maintaining a sensuousness of language, Eliot also

developed a great deal that was new and original. His early works, like The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, draw on a wide range of cultural reference to depict a
modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply meaningful. Eliot uses
techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points without having to argue them
explicitly. As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did modernize himself. In addition to
showcasing a variety of poetic innovations, Eliots early poetry also develops a series of
characters who fit the type of the modern man as described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others of
Eliots contemporaries. The title character of Prufrock is a perfect example: solitary,
neurasthenic, overly intellectual, and utterly incapable of expressing himself to the outside
world.
As Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his poetry
changed. The later poems emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of allusion; they
simultaneously become more hopeful in tone: Thus, a work such as Four Quartets explores more
philosophical territory and offers propositions instead of nihilism. The experiences of living in
England during World War II inform the Quartets, which address issues of time, experience,
mortality, and art. Rather than lamenting the ruin of modern culture and seeking redemption in
the cultural past, as The Waste Land does, the quartets offer ways around human limits through
art and spirituality. The pastiche of the earlier works is replaced by philosophy and logic, and the
formal experiments of his early years are put aside in favor of a new language consciousness,
which emphasizes the sounds and other physical properties of words to create musical, dramatic,
and other subtle effects.
However, while Eliots poetry underwent significance transformations over the course of
his career, his poems also bear many unifying aspects: all of Eliots poetry is marked by a
conscious desire to bring together the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that
both honors the past and acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts,
and he frequently comments on his poetic endeavors in the poems themselves. This humility,
which often comes across as melancholy, makes Eliots some of the most personal, as well as the
most intellectually satisfying, poetry in the English language.
Themes
The Damaged Psyche of Humanity
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, causing artists to 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 the socalled Great War, causing a general crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place

in a radically altered society. As for England, 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 titular speaker wonders whether he
should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to keep living.
Humanitys 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.
The Power of Literary History
Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary canon, and he packed
his work full of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In The Tradition and
the Individual Talent, an essay first published in 1919, Eliot praises the literary tradition and
states that the best writers are those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers who
came before, as if all of literature constituted a stream in which each new writer must enter and
swim. Only the very best new work will subtly shift the streams current and thus improve the
literary tradition. Eliot also argued that the literary past must be integrated into contemporary
poetry. But the poet must guard against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most
essential bits of the past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers. The Waste Land juxtaposes
fragments of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from
modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts and a
historical context for his examination of society and humanity.
The Changing Nature of Gender Roles
Over the course of Eliots life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible,
and Eliot reflected those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the nineteenth
century, women were confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not discussed or publicly
explored, and a puritanical atmosphere dictated most social interactions. Queen Victorias death
in 1901 helped usher in a new era of excess and forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age,
which lasted until 1910. World War I, from 1914 to 1918, further transformed society, as people
felt both increasingly alienated from one another and empowered to break social mores. English
women began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in 1918, and the flappers of the Jazz Age
began smoking and drinking alcohol in public. Women were allowed to attend school, and
women who could afford it continued their education at those universities that began accepting
women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers created gay and lesbian characters and
re-imagined masculinity and femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug off
rather than as absolute identities dictated by society.
Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the
freedoms inherent in the modern age. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reflects the feelings

of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from World War I to find
women empowered by their new role as wage earners. Prufrock, unable to make a decision,
watches women wander in and out of a room, talking of Michelangelo (14), and elsewhere
admires their downy, bare arms. A disdain for unchecked sexuality appears in both Sweeney
Among the Nightingales (1918) and The Waste Land. The latter portrays rape, prostitution, a
conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive sexuality. Nevertheless, the
poems central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphroditeand his powers of prophesy and
transformation are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias, Eliot
creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together in
one body.
Motifs
Fragmentation
Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern
existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliots view, humanitys psyche
had been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire. Collaging bits and
pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within one
poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanitys damaged psyche and the modern world,
with its barrage of sensory perceptions. Critics read the following line from The Waste Land as a
statement of Eliots poetic project: These fragments I have shored against my ruins (431).
Practically every line in The Waste Land echoes an academic work or canonical literary text, and
many lines also have long footnotes written by Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and
to encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper into his sources. These echoes
and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot includes only parts, rather than whole texts
from the canon. Using these fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes and images in
the literary tradition, as well as to place his ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along
the spectrum of history.
Mythic and Religious Ritual
Eliots tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books
in the literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to
both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to
The Waste Land, Eliot explains the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew
heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of
the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The
Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight quests to find the
grail, the only object capable of healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing
the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants,
Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems take their images almost exclusively

from Christianity, such as the echoes of the Lords Prayer in The Hollow Men and the retelling
of the story of the wise men in Journey of the Magi (1927).
Infertility
Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the
people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or
dysfunctional, unable to cope with either reproductive or nonreproductive sexuality: the Fisher
King represents damaged sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither
and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in
A Game of Chess represent an out-of-control sexuality. World War I not only eradicated an
entire generation of young men in Europe but also ruined the land. Trench warfare and chemical
weapons, the two primary methods by which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving
behind detritus and carnage. In The Hollow Men, the speaker discusses the dead land, now
filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised hands, stiffened from rigor
mortis. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speakers mind to become infertile: his
head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to perceive accurately, or
to conceive of images or thoughts.
Symbols
Water
In Eliots poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliots characters wait for water to
quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and
pass by fetid pools of standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring
life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from
The Waste Land. Traditionally, water can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus
Christ, and Eliot draws upon these traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace,
and water brings relief elsewhere in The Waste Land and in Little Gidding, the fourth part of
Four Quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along the shore in
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but, like Odysseus in Homers Odyssey (ca. 800 B.C.E.),
he realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices: the poem concludes we drown
(131). Eliot thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for what looks innocuous
might turn out to be very dangerous.
The Fisher King
The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. While writing his long poem,
Eliot drew on From Ritual to Romance, a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail by Miss
Jessie L. Weston, for many of his symbols and images. Westons book examined the connections
between ancient fertility rites and Christianity, including following the evolution of the Fisher
King into early representations of Jesus Christ as a fish. Traditionally, the impotence or death of

the Fisher King brought unhappiness and famine. Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic of
humanity, robbed of its sexual potency in the modern world and connected to the
meaninglessness of urban existence. But the Fisher King also stands in for Christ and other
religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of What the
Thunder Said fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder
sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliots scene echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ
performs one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the Sea of
Galilee with just a small amount of fish.
Music and Singing
Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low
culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera,
and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot
blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner
with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes
with phrases from the Lords Prayer in The Hollow Men, and The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock is, as the title, implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem ends
with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowninga scene that echoes
Odysseuss interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way in
which Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions. Elsewhere Eliot uses
lyrics as a kind of chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem, much as the chorus
functions in Greek tragedies.