Jeremiah's Mad Again

Abstract

T ELIOT stands at a transitional point in the ideology of .S. America, a position of which he was at least partially aware. In Eliot's mind, America no longer held the key to the universe. For centuries, America's unique eschatological role had been touted. New England's particular use of the biblical Book of Jeremiah, Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch have argued, is at the very center only of New England's sermonic but its literary tradition as well. That tradition was T. S. Eliot's birthright from both paternal and maternal ancestors stretching back to seventeenth-century Puritans. For one so concerned with the function of tradition, it is surprising, then, to find Eliot, consciously or not, relying on the Book of Jeremiah in The Waste Land. Indeed, its influence is much stronger than the one Eliot chose to acknowledge: Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance, a book on the Grail legend that Eliot credited with providing not only the title but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem.' On the contrary, I hope to show, the evidence favors just the Book of Jeremiah but the whole of America's jeremiad tradition as a more fundamental source of Eliot's wilderness creation.