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T.S. Eliot
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war. Eliot’s major poem, The Waste Land, published in 1922, is not a land
literally laid waste by war, a real wasteland which poets such as Owen and
Rosenberg had graphically described. It does not mention the economic
dislocation which would eventually lead to the unemployment and economic
crises of the late 1920s. Instead the poem depicts a cultural and spiritual
waste land, a land populated by people who are, physically and emotionally,
living a kind of death in the midst of their everyday lives:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone so many.
(The Burial of the Dead, from The Waste Land)
The people move across a desolate landscape of fragmented images;
they do not relate to one another. The many different voices we hear
in the poem speak not to each other but past each other. There is no
uniting belief in one transcendent God. In this sense, Eliot echoes the
post-Darwinian concerns of an unstable world, and many of the ideas
owe a lot to Frazer’s The Golden Bough (see page 350).
To many of T.S. Eliot’s contemporaries, the whole poem was written
in the accent of its times – an unmistakably twentieth-century, indeed
post-war poem which records the collapse in the values of Western
civilisation. The main examples of this collapse are sterile, unloving
sexual relationships, cultural confusion, and spiritual desolation. Eliot
sees the root of the modern world’s unhappiness and alienation in
the fact that people are unable to bring together the different areas of
their experience to make a complete whole. Their social, sexual, and
religious experiences are fragmentary and not unified.
Eliot’s poetry breaks radically with much of the other poetry written
during these years. Like the War Poets, he felt that the poetic idiom available
to him was exhausted and had to be changed. Different experiences needed
different styles and uses of language. Eliot’s poetry went much further than
that of the War Poets, however. His poetry was formally more experimental
and innovative, and intellectually more complex and philosophical.
In an essay on The Metaphysical Poets (1921) – which reveals the
influence on him of seventeenth-century poetry – Eliot wrote about
complex modern poetry for complex modern times:
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and