The Waste Land: Eliot’s Neo-Empire

Abstract

Thomas Stearns Eliot's The Waste Land is a mysterious enigmatic text in both its form and content which still invites many critics and reviewers to an infinite range of interpretations finding in it a striking departure from nineteenth century poetry and raising the flag of modernism and postmodernism. Its appearance in 1922 started a critical debate among critics who found it hard to place both because of the poet's complex artistic strategies and because of the poem's kaleidoscopic orchestrated structure. From this perspective, the present paper is mainly concerned with the poem’s kaleidoscopic structure highlighting the text's intertextuality, heterogeneity and multiculturalism. It seeks to re-read and investigate the poem from the perspective of Edward Said's Postcolonial theory proving that the poem’s encyclopedic structure achieves for the poet a form of Neo-Colonialism where the poet’s intellectual domination replaces the territorial one. The study concludes by showing that The Waste Land is an early example of postmodernism where the text becomes the poet’s Neo-empire.