T.S. Eliot’s Descent Into ‘The Waste Land’
“The Waste Land,” the most influential poem of the 20th century, was published 100 years ago in T.S. Eliot’s highbrow journal The Criterion. This wildly original and difficult long poem portrays with imaginative authority the modern world as a spiritual desert. Wretched people devoid of religious belief lead a meaningless existence. By describing the bitter mood, after World War I had destroyed a belief in European civilization, the poem touched raw nerves.
The poem is written in disconnected pieces (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) and has sudden transitions. Defining his technique, Eliot said with a papal pronouncement in “The Metaphysical Poets,” “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect.” He conceded that the “rapid association of thought . . . requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.” Subtly interwoven with foreign words and learned quotations from classic authors, the lines contrast the debased present with the lofty culture of the past. Eliot identified these allusions, for the first time in poetry, with scholarly endnotes that sent serious readers racing for the libraries.
Eliot’s high and low styles, lyrical and satirical passages, range from conversations in elegant society to cockney talk of abortions in a pub: “It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.” He had a puritanical conscience: a lack of sympathy with common life, a horror of vulgarity, and a shrinking from sexual feelings. In “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” a “young man carbuncular” achieves a sordid seduction: “Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; / Exploring hands encounter no defense; / His vanity requires no response, / And makes a welcome of indifference.” Acrobatic skills are required while precariously floating on the Thames: “By Richmond I raised my knees / Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot insisted that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” But “The Waste Land” vividly exposes his sensitive feelings and makes his personal misery represent the universal condition of mankind. He had recovered from a nervous breakdown on the Kentish coast in 1921, faced a bleak future and confesses like an early Existentialist: “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”
Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, was an attractive, bright, mentally unbalanced, ether-sniffing invalid. She tormented him until he fled from her, and he quotes her frantic words to an unresponsive husband: “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.” Spoiled and bored after her affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Vivien desperately asks: “What shall I do now? What shall I do?. . . What shall we do tomorrow? / What shall we ever do?” Daisy Buchanan echoes these words in “The Great Gatsby.”
Eliot assumed the persona of a cynical and disillusioned outsider: superior, rebellious and vitriolic. He praised the 17th-century poet John Donne for the strange qualities in his own work. Both poets transcend romantic feelings and challenge their audience by penetrating the very depth of the human mind and body, by looking, as Eliot said in his essay on metaphysical poets, “into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract.”
A scholarly edition of the poem revealed that Ezra Pound deleted a delightful imitation of Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” A woman wakes up and thinks of a shocking experience: “Admonished by the sun’s inclining ray, / And swift approaches of the thievish day, / The white-armed Fresca blinks, and yawns, and gapes, / Aroused from dreams of love and pleasant rapes.”
Eliot’s sharp dialogue and brilliant, allusive similes—“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne”—have become part of modern culture. (jb - see below) After a discouraging epigraph in Greek and Latin, the poem opens by paradoxically asserting that April, the traditional season of birth and renewal, “is the cruellest month.” The city people seem like the living dead: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” There’s a yearning to escape, “In the mountains, there you feel free.” But later on the mountains offer nothing more than a decayed hole, tumbled graves and an empty chapel. Rats run through the poem and creepy, squeaky “bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings.” Against this dismal decay Eliot offers solemn and superb lines on Christopher Wren’s church: “where the walls / Of Magnus Martyr hold / Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.”
Straining after belief, Eliot confronts the problem of evil and the soul of man, and follows Dante in a spiritual journey from hell to heaven, from sin to salvation. He had studied Sanskrit at Harvard; and the Hindu-chant ending—“Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata”—incomprehensible to readers, fails to fill the spiritual void.
“The Waste Land” has sensual lines—“Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, / Unguent, powdered, or liquid”—ambitious themes, dramatic intensity and tragic emotions. Eliot’s keen intelligence, formidable learning and technical skill define his achievement.
Mr. Meyers has recently published “Robert Lowell in Love” (University of Massachusetts) and “Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy” (University of Virginia).
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A Short Analysis of Enobarbus’ ‘The Barge She Sat in, Like a Burnished Throne.’ (excerpt)
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’: so begins perhaps the most famous speech from William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The words are uttered by Domitius Enobarbus, a follower of Mark Antony, in Act 2 Scene 2, as he describes the appearance of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, when Mark Antony first saw her and fell in love with her as she rode her barge down the river Cydnus. ...
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne’ would be taken up by a much later poet, the twentieth-century modernist poet T. S. Eliot, in the opening lines from ‘A Game of Chess’, the second section of his The Waste Land. But Eliot altered ‘barge’ to ‘Chair’, and made Cleopatra an ordinary twentieth-century upper-class woman coping with the fallout from the First World War. ...
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