The “blossoming of lilac-bush”: A Study of the Post-War Reception of The Waste Land

Abstract

T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ has developed a contemporaneity by effectively transcending the Modernist context within which it is born. The poem exhibits certain features that have stayed relevant for the later generations of poets and readers even after much of the Modernist intentions have ceased to exist. In our presentation, we will identify those features by providing a brief analysis of the responses to the poem from multiple poets, mostly those after World War I. The principal observation resulting from the readings would be that the poem contains a restorative promise which proved commensurable with the democratizing tendency characterizing much of the post-war era at a time when a critical attitude towards Modernism was developing among the Late-Modernist and Postmodern poets. While not denying the essentially Modernist nature of ‘The Waste Land’, this paper will show how almost all the conflicting receptions of the poem have converged upon the vision of revitalization.