T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night: The City of Melancholy

Abstract

From classical period to Victorian era, there were many poets and writers who influenced Eliot and his way of representing the aesthetics of literature. Among them, James Thomson and his apocalyptic poem, The City of Dreadful Night is a good comparison with Eliot’s The Waste Land. Both poems seem to have a lot in common: their tones, gloomy perspectives toward the world, and the various elements of melancholy. There are some biographical evidence that can support the influential relationship between Eliot and Thomson: Eliot gave a lecture which covered a long list of authors including Thomson. According to Schuchard, he was sixteen when he first read The City of Dreadful Night. In line with this biographical evidence, the interpretation of the influence of Thomson on Eliot might primarily derive from the elements of melancholy because both poets used a lot of imageries of melancholy in common. In order to understand how melancholy is permeated, deeply-rooted and finally represented in their poems, it is necessary to trace what kind of melancholic imageries there are and the meanings of iconological representations of melancholy in both poems. In The Waste Land, ghosts, hopelessness, gloom, and the Godless world are all repeated imageries from Thomson’s poem as they were presented as typical iconological imageries in medieval paintings. Most of them are instantly associated with the sense of vanitas, memento mori, and eventually melancholy. Conclusively, Eliot rephrases what Thomson described about the city by repeating imageries of melancholy.