Abstract
Although T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land , is a defiantly enigmatic and bewildering poem, the text still occupies a central place in the literary canon nearly a century after its conception. Eliot’s initial idea was to publish the work as several separate poems, yet despite this, The Waste Land is still studied as a unified whole with a unifying voice and an identifiable “message”. In this paper I argue that the poem’s reputation today rests upon a mass of critical discourse which insists on interpreting “meaning” at the expense of considering the poem’s musical, allusive and hypnotic power.
Highlights
That Eliot’s poem is essentially enigmatic, deliberately constructed from fragments, and reads like a confusing babel of disparate voices does not deter the critical impulse to uncover an overall message, to fuse the voices together in an act of reduction: Eliot and Pound’s montage is always the victim of paraphrasing. This quest to capture the truth residing somewhere in The Waste Land has guaranteed the canonical status of the poem, which depends upon a mass of critical discourse reproducing itself and paradoxically justifying the text’s cultural centrality
I will consider TWL in order to ascertain whether it is historically particular, or a text that frees itself from historical particulars by expressing “timeless” values; to what extent the poem is a personal expression of Eliot’s thoughts and feelings, or expresses something objective and impersonal; whether TWL is a clear example of Modernism or if its uniqueness escapes categorisation; whether Eliot’s poem is comprehensible or, as the critic Cyril Connolly says, “unintelligible”. (CONNOLLY, 1975, p. 207)
The original manuscript was more than twice the length of the published poem and Eliot even considered publishing the parts as separate poems
Summary
By denying the poem reflects the post-war zeitgeist, Eliot is making the case for an “ahistorical” or purely “literary” reading of the poem, one which recognises the cultural significance of the classical references and of Eliot’s mastery of form and gift for parody, but which obstructs any attempt at a historical analysis of the poem’s ideological significance. At times Eliot appeared to be surprised by the critical attention given to TWL and was quick to deny that he was attempting, in the poem, to make an ideological statement about the “decline of the West” or the parlous state of modern society.
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