1. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ represents ‘a vision of dissolution and spiritual draught’. Do you agree? Justify your answer ?
Ans :-
Thomas Stearns Eliot, one of the greatest modern English poets, has tried his best to mark his time by expressing the inherent dangers of modern civilization in his writings. He was conscious of the disordered and fragmented social condition of his time – a time of political instability, anarchy and chaos. In his exclusive poem “The Waste Land” he depicts an appalling vision of chaotic times and disturbed lives. The poem portrays a society that has been left barren – morally, spiritually, intellectually and sexually – by the First World War. The poem is an exclusive example of disappointment and spiritual vacuity of the modern civilization especially after the world entangled into a devastating war that resulted in millions of deaths. All through the poem Eliot depicts the modern waste land that represents the social anarchy and spiritual emptiness of troubled modern life which drives the individual to go deep into emotional crisis and intellectual despair. The paper intends to examine how Eliot’s “The Waste Land” explores the spiritual barrenness and physical deformities of the distressed modern people.
At once a classicist, a critic, a poet, a playwright, a mystic and a philosopher, Thomas Stearns Eliot was a myriad minded man who enjoyed a long life span of more than 75 years and whose literary contribution extended over a period of almost 55 years. With his creative spirit he tried his hand in diverse literary genres – poetry, plays, essays, literary criticism, and so on, and dominated the literary landscape of the twentieth century. Through his writings, critical essays and experiments in versification, style and diction, he regenerated English poetryand influenced the direction of modern poetry. In his writings, he has tried his best to make his time conscious of itself and expressed the inherent dangers of modern civilization. He was conscious about the social anarchy and the spiritual vacuity of his time and in his writings, he depicted the disaster, agony, horror, spiritual sterility, and alienation of modern people. His celebrated poem, The Waste Land (1922) presents a dark and gloomy picture of human sufferingsin the twentieth century. The poem is a study of a civilization doomed by its own sterility (Coote 26). It refers to the spiritual and intellectual decadence of the contemporary world. The poem is an important landmark in the history of English literature and exposes the disillusionment caused by the First World War. To cite Harold Bloom, The Waste Land can be read as “a testament to the disillusionment of a generation, an exposition of the manifest despair and spiritual bankruptcy of the years after World War I” (40). Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, the poem portrays London as a barren waste land. The poem is built round the symbols of drought and flood which represent death and re-birth respectively, and this fundamental idea is referred to the poem.
Eliot is one of those twentieth century writers who witnessed the socio-political turmoil and transformation of the post-war England. The war had destroyed all that were traditionally good. The most dangerous effect was the loss of spirituality. People became disillusioned by the futility and impotence of the catastrophic war. The war had left many people in a state of destruction and disappointment. Millions of women lost their husbands, children lost their parents, and a sense of abandonment and loss encompassed the nation. “Europe slumped into a monumental melancholy . . . the utopian social dreams evoked by wartime rhetoric were brutally erased by inflation, unemployment and widespread deprivation, not to mention an influenza epidemic that ravaged the world in 1918-1919 and killed more people than the war itself” (Ekstein 235). It is in this aftermath of the First World War that Eliot appears with his poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land. The poem had a significant influence on his contemporaries and is regarded one of the most important documents of its time.
The poem portrays a debilitated world, a world that has declined or disregarded the spiritual life. In the poem, Eliot depicts the excruciating burden of modern city life, its lack of objective and direction, its lack of beliefs and values, reflecting the breakdown of values, total disarray and near collapse of the European civilization in the early 1920s. Many persons viewed the poem as an allegation against the post-war European civilization and as an articulation of disillusionment with the existing society that Eliot viewed as spiritually barren.
The Waste Land was written at the time when the First World War had just ended placing the world in an age of depression, loss, and ultimately death looming over everyone (Ahmed 160). The poem centers round Eliot’s reading of two contemporary influential texts – Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). Both of Weston and Frazer discussed the myth of the Fisher King in their books. Weston’s book appeared at the very time when Eliot was seeking a coherent shape for the mass of intricate material that enters into his poem (Southam 127). Eliot makes particular use of Weston’s account of the Fisher King, a figure which recurs in a number of fertility myths, and whose story is one of obvious relevance to this poem (127). According to the legends, the land has been blighted by a curse. The crops do not grow, and the animals cannot reproduce. The trouble of the land is caused by the plight of the king of the land, the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals (Brooks 128-129). The injury affects the king’s fertility, and his impotence is the cause of his country becoming a dried out ‘waste land’. The curse can only be lifted by the arrival of a knight who must complete several rituals, “not by pursuing advantages for himself, but by giving himself to the quest of seeking the health and salvation of the land” . Eliot picks up the legend of the Fisher King and his wasteland to describe the existing barren state of modern civilization. Eliot says he drew heavily on this legend for his poem, and critics have found that many of the poem’s allusions refer to this idea.
The title of the poem consists of the central waste land symbol and refers to the intellectual and spiritual barrenness of the modern civilization. It conveys the idea of emotional and spiritual sterility and barrenness of the world that Eliot saw after the First World War. “The ‘waste’ is not, however, that of war’s devastation and bloodshed, but the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man, the waste of [the modern] civilization” (Southam 126). The title evokes the pictureof a waste land devastated by drought and famine which leads to large-scale starvation, predicament and death. Through the waste land symbol, Eliot shows that the twentieth century civilization is just an infertile, arid world with no genuine retrieving characteristics. The land is barren, and therefore, unable to let anything grow. This barrenness signifies the intellectual and spiritual decadence that has occurred in the contemporary world, where no new hope of faith can develop. Eliot relates the waste land symbol to the ‘Unreal City’ such as London, the “arid plain”(l. 424)*, where the readers get a sense of the “mountains of rock without water” (l. 334) and “the dry stone no sound of water” (l. 24). They see “a heap of broken images” (l. 22) made up of dirtyroads, dead trees, desert rocks, dry bones, rats scurrying in sewers, empty cisterns, and exhausted wells. Thus, the waste land pertains to the contemporary scenario of anguish and waste following the bloodshed of World War I.
The Waste Land is divided into five sections, each with a title like ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’. The poem is preceded by an epigraph which comes from the Satyricon, a satire of the poet Petronius (27 BC - 66 AD). The satire implies the endless world-weariness, blindness and absence of redeeming joy which characterizes The Waste Land (Coote 30). In English translation, the epigraph means, “For I once saw with my own eyes the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered, ‘I want to die’.” (Eliot 3) In Greek mythology, Sibyls were women endowed with prophetic power, the power to see into the future. The Cumaean Sibyl had been famous both for her prophecy and for her beauty. She was loved by Apollo who offered her immortality. She accepted the offer but forgot to ask for perpetual youth. Hence, as she grew older, both her memory and prophetic power faded. Trapped in the present she was only slightlyaware of her mythical, magical past and quite indifferent to the future. As such, living in anapparently eternal present, her fate anticipated the fates of the inhabitants of The Waste Land(Saunders 35). Her death-wish is related to her wish to throw away the archaic life, just as the walking dead of the modern “Unreal City” have nothing to expect in life but death. Death alone offers escape; death alone promises the end. In this way the epigraph implies the theme of the poem– Life in the modern waste land is a living death or a life in death, like the life of Sibyl. In the story of the Cumaean Sibyl Eliot found an image which both encapsulated the dislocation of present, past and future time which he saw as symptomatic of the cultural plight of modern people (Saunders34-35). The prophecy of Sibyl sets the tone for The Waste Land as a poem that harshlyfocuses on the numbness and absolute barrenness of the post-war European civilization. The Sibyl’s affliction reflects what Eliot perceives as his own–Eliot lives in a society that has degraded and dried up but will not perish, and he is bound to live with memories of its previous glory. Like the Sibyl the modern people have life but not the youthful vigor and productivity.
conclusion:-
Throughout The Waste Land, Eliot holds a mirror to the society and the mirror reflects the predicaments of modern life in a physical, moral, emotional and spiritual waste land where promiscuity, materialism and corruption were widespread and where there was a lack of communication and interaction between individuals. Beginning with the section one entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead’ that portrays a physical wasteland and buried human consciousness, Eliot continues to the section five titled ‘What the Thunder Said’ to find out a probable way out to the problem that afflicted modern life. Throughout the journey up to section five, the readers observe some serious problems of modern life like ignorance, sexual abuse, lust, hypocrisy, futility, the vain purpose of life, and so forth. The poem deals with the whole post War generation referring to the spiritual and intellectual decay of the modern world. The poem portrays a society that has been left barren – morally, spiritually, intellectually and sexually – by the war. Eliot takes the readers into the very heart of the waste land which is post war Europe and makes them realize the plight of a whole generation. That generation is effectively symbolized by the withered Cumaean Sibyl of the epigraph, with her desperate wish to die; by Madame Sosostris, the deceitful fortune-teller who knows nothing of the mysteries of life; by Mrs. Equitone to whom life has lost all variety and distinction; by Mrs. Porter and Sweeney, an old procuress and her crude client; by the lady of situations, a victim of her own nerves and of the hysterical relationship with her lover; by Lil, who looks so antique while she is still thirty-one; by the typist and her seducer going through the sex act in an indifferent, mechanical, routine-like manner; by the demobilized Albert who wants a good time, as do the loitering heirs of city directors; by Mr. Eugenides, the dubious merchant; and so on. All these characters convey the idea of emotional and spiritual barrenness as well as the physical deformities of the world that Eliot saw after the First World War. That world is the Waste Land of the poem’s title: motionless, sexually impotent, and spiritually barren.
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