The “City Man” in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence

Abstract

T. S. Eliot composed the first draft of The Waste Land at Margate and in Lausanne during the autumn of 1921, when funds secured through Ezra Pound had enabled him to take a long holiday for rest and recuperation. He sorely needed both, and in fact was under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, for overwork in his double capacity as bank clerk and man of letters had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though we must allow that he was distressed by postwar chaos and the decay of Europe, themes of a more specific and less elevated nature were certainly among his thoughts. He could hardly escape from the news of the day, which we find reproduced plainly or masked in much of his early work; and he was, in the words of a recent critic, “preoccupied … with the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London”—Lloyd's Bank, where he held a minor post in the foreign exchange department at a starting salary of £120 per annum.