‘Dung and death’: Waste and desire in The Waste Land

Abstract

Much of the early poetry of T.S. Eliot embodies a rejection of sexual desire. Gabrielle McIntire in ‘Modernism, Memory, and Desire’ argues that Eliot’s poetry can be read as the “expression of desire that has reached its limit and knows it”. In fact, throughout Eliot’s poems, desire is rejected, deferred, and displaced, albeit the fact that this strategy is not always successful. Eliot espouses a poetics of failure of desire and the conflicts and compromises arising out of it. In this paper, we will argue that the sexual non-rapport is Eliot’s poetry often finds expression by a sublimation of desire. Desire, or any possibility of the sexual encounter, is turned into shit. What is left behind as the rem(a)inder is the waste. We are constantly reminded that to desire is also to be anxious of the limitations of desire, because what lies beyond desire is the fear of death.