Reality and Mythology, Convention and Novelty in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Abstract

Eliot's Waste Land , its implications, sources, his treatment of myth, reality, convention and novelty, has received a huge bulk of criticism among Eliot's scholars whose views of the poem are divided into two categories: positive and negative. This article examines these terms against Eliot's fundamental approaches to an individual work of literature in his "Tradition and Talent" essay and the application of the "objective correlative" when applying criticism to the poem. The article argues that Eliot employed myth, allegory and symbols in a very novel way to connect the past with the present; he could criticize without direction and educate and entertain his readers with host of interpretations applicable to the now and then. Another important  key to understand Eliot's Waste Land is that his  objective correlative is what links the poem which may look fragmentary, but  in fact complete in thought with the help of this technique. By so doing Eliot has gained a statutes among the modernists in the realm of poetry – new modes of writing poetry.