T. S. Eliot (1888–1965): "The Waste Land"

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) on September 26, 1888. He attended Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, studying philosophy and writing a dissertation on the logician F. H. Bradley. While in college, Eliot began writing poetry, but in 1908 he discovered French symbolist poetry and his whole attitude toward literature changed. Ezra Pound read some of Eliot’s poetry in the 1910s and immediately decided that Eliot would be a member of his own literary circle. Pound advocated for Eliot with Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine and got Eliot’s poem ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ published in that journal in 1915.

Eliot had settled in London at the same time and married the emotionally unstable Vivian Haigh-Wood. Eliot struggled to make a living, working as a teacher and later at Lloyd’s Bank until 1925. In 1922 Eliot published his brilliant and successful poem ‘‘The Waste Land,’’. The manuscript of the poem demonstrates that Ezra Pound played a large role in the editing of the poem. ‘‘The Waste Land’’ brought Eliot fame and a place at the center of the burgeoning modernist movement.

For the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Eliot used his fame and his position as editor of a prominent literary journal (The Criterion) and as managing editor of the publishing house Faber & Faber to argue for a new standard of evaluating literature. In critical essays and his own poetry, he denigrated the romantics and neoclassicists and celebrated Dante and the Elizabethan ‘‘metaphysical’’ poets. He argued for the central role of ‘‘Tradition’’ in literature and downplayed the cult of individual genius created by the romantics.

For the remainder of his life, Eliot occupied the role of literary elder statesman. He continued to produce poems such as the Four Quartets but was never prolific. He became the model of the conservative, royalist, High Church English gentleman. He died on January 4, 1965.

 

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘The Waste Land,’’ published in 1922, is the single most important modernist poem. Essentially plotless, the poem instead attempts to capture historical development to the present day by use of allusion. Characters such as Tiresias, the Smyrna merchant, and an East London housewife, wander through the poem. London, the ‘‘Unreal City’’ in the fog, becomes the synecdoche for the fallen world as a whole. The poem moves from Elizabethan times to the ancient world to the present and ends, finally, with a small failing voice speaking Sanskrit.

Interestingly, in its original version the poem was six times as long and titled ‘‘He Do The Police in Different Voices.’’ When he was still a struggling poet, T. S. Eliot showed the poem to Ezra Pound, asking for his advice. Pound performed what he called a ‘‘Caesarean operation’’ on Eliot’s manuscript, telling him to cut the links between the vignettes so that the poem appeared as a series of fragments. Eliot never called attention to Pound’s central role in creating The Waste Land and it was not until the 1960s, when the original manuscript was found, that Pound’s true role became publicly known.

Most critics have seen the poem as expressing a fundamental despair at the sense that, with the loss of all certainties, the world was nothing but ‘‘fragments’’ that are ‘‘shored against [our] ruin.’’ It continues to vex students with its complexity, but even the most basic reading evokes a sense of desperation and loss.