All too often, to the ones unfamiliar with many of the works of the Twentieth Century, poetry is something beautiful, full of love and happiness and good will. No longer a pro pos. The Wasteland is a perfect example: “Eliot in early poems such as… The Waste Land, creates a world devoid of beauty” (Boyd, 23). If, as the old adage goes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” in The Waste Land, Eliot sees little hope for the world in which he then lived. The capacities for emotional release such as love is something, as Boyd characterizes it, is absent in The Waste Land. As proof he cites that “Eliot offers three dramatic vignettes in the middle sections of the poem in which characters exhibit incapacity even to feel desire for another person” (Boyd 24).
The problem many have and have had since its publication in 1922 was the fact that few people understood the sadness and morbidity of Eliot’s landscape and its population. One has to remember that this was just a few years after World War I where Britain lost millions of its generation dying young in the trenches in France. People, whether real or imagined in poetry, still were all too often unable to cope with the reality- the aftermath of enormous tragedy. The enormity of destruction and literally the death of a generation is the basis for The Wasteland: “Spiritual stultification marks Eliot’s modern wasteland. The individual self remains impotent to reach beyond itself in any directed commitment” (Timmerman, 11).
While poetry literally demands critiques and explanations, it is impossible to find a single unified explanation of the meaning of The Wasteland and the people depicted therein. In fact, some critics seem to dismiss the originality of the poem entirely: “T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland of 1922 is, largely, a pastiche of ironic quotations from past literature and from popular culture” (Campbell, 123). The poem’s title, whether many will agree or not, is really a metaphor for the human condition post-World War I. And there are images of rats throughout this poem, rats’ alleys, rats scudding along at the waterfront, “a rat crept through the vegetation” (line 186). But perhaps one of the most horrifying lines of this poem- forget the imagery of rats and distraught people from all over the world:
What is that sound high in the air
“
Murmur of maternal lamentation
(line 366-7)
The utter sadness and inconsolability of the mothers- widows and mothers who lost their sons in what then was called “the war to end all wars.” These agonizing sounds described herein are what may well haunt the perceptive reader far more than carefully constructed images or mention (cribbed in a way, perhaps to test the reader) of lines and characters from other literature and history. Who today is writing a Wasteland for our agonizing times? Surely not the unwashed bearded screamer, or the meticulous ones who subscribe to The National Review, or those who expound on NPR or pseudo esoteric cable channels or self-publish their mindless chatter thinking it profound and full of dire warnings.
References:
Boyd, Joshua: “The Impulse Toward Beauty in ‘Prufrock,’ The
Waste Land, and Four Quartets: T. S. ELIOT’S AESTHETIC
RESPONSE TO THE SPIRITUAL COLLAPSE OF HIS ERA”
Yeats Eliot Review 27. 1/2 (Spring 2010):
Campbell, Robert: “Subjectivity is All” The American Scholar
77. 1 (Winter 2008)
Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land” (1922)
Timmerman, John: “THE ARISTOTELIAN MR. ELIOT: Structure
and Strategy in The Waste Land”
Yeats Eliot Review 24. 2 (Summer 20 07