WASTE LAND

The Waste land

The Waste Land

Introduction

Eliot was very successful as a poet and critic in his early years, in London. He completed a doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley, the philosopher (though he never returned to Harvard to defend it), and in 1915, he married Vivienne Haig Wood. The marriage was unhappy, however, and in 1921, Eliot entered a sanatorium in Switzerland to recover from an emotional breakdown. It was during this disturbed period of his life that he wrote The Waste Land (Brooks, 106). Later that year, Eliot gave the poem to Pound, who cut it by half into its latest form. Eliot's original title for the poem was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” but Pound preferred emphasizing the mythic structure and cut the social satire. Upon publication in 1922, the poem immediately recognized as a major if very difficult creation. The poet later described The Waste Land as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” It read by most critics, however, as a social indictment rather than as an actual utterance (Bloom, 46).

Analysis

The poem begins with an epigraph from Petronius and a dedication to Ezra Pound as il miglior fabbro (the better maker), the tribute paid by Arnaut Daniel to Dante in Purgatory of La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). The epigraph portrays the Cumean Sibyl responding to the question “Sibyl, what do you want?” with the answer “I want to die.” This sets the mood of despair and hopeless resignation. In portraying the spiritual, sexual, and social emptiness of the post-World War I world, Eliot drew on Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), on the medieval quest for the Grail, and on James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890-1915), especially the sections on a dying god who resurrected. From its inception, the poem centrally concerned with the myth of a dead land that needs to be renewed by a quester or a sacrificial god.

The first section of the poem, “The Burial of the Dead,” is a reference to the burial service in the Anglican Church. The time is April, but instead of being a period of renewal it is “the cruelest month.” The outer renewal of the seasons is not matched by that within the speakers and characters in the poem. The imagery shifts to the dryness of the wasteland, a place “where the sun beats, / and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.” The imagery of dryness becomes a central motif in the poem and used to define the spiritual and social aridity of the time.

Knowledge and authority in this rotten world found in “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant” and her pack of tarot cards rather than in the church or state. One of the cards in that deck, “the man with three staves,” represents the Fisher King, the wounded ruler whose disease causes the wasteland; ...