‘Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck’: Shipwrecked Nostos in a Ulyssean Palimpsest in The Waste Land

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I read the shipwrecked journeys in T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land as belonging to a long-standing trope of travel by sea. By examining the connections between the scenes of shipwrecks in the poem and its intertexts, including works by Homer and Shakespeare, I reconstruct the characters’ homecoming journeys in a Ulyssean palimpsest of nostos (‘homecoming’) in these scenes. I argue that these scenes foreground the challenges of homecoming by sea while implying the hope for returns through mythical implications and dramatic effect. The article situates drowning and resurrection, the governing themes of the poem, in the critical lineage of nostos that encompasses deferred return and symbolic rebirth. Informed by the context of the Great War and Eliot’s New England heritage, the article challenges the work in modernist studies that tends to interpret Eliot’s depiction of these thwarted journeys as a rejection of homecoming.