The Waste Land (Criticism)

Criticism

Ryan D. Poquette

Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses the structure of the poem.

When Eliot first published The Waste Land in 1922, it caused a colossal stir in the literary world and in society in general. Eliot's use of nontraditional techniques, his gritty imagery, and the sheer incoherence of the work as a whole mystified, enraged, and enthralled readers and critics. As Helen Vendler notes in her 1998 Time article, "Modern poetry had struck its note." In fact, readers had never seen anything quite this modern before. The poem seemed to have a little bit of everything, and was much meatier than the other literary offerings of the time, and not just in Europe. Vendler notes that "Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines." But even though every reference in Eliot's apocalyptic opus has since been documented, and one can begin to draw parallels among the poem's many pieces, most critics agree that these pieces will probably never be assembled into one cohesive whole. The poem's structure defies that type of interpretation.

When one discusses the structure of a modernist work like The Waste Land, it helps to break it down into two types, structure on a large scale and structure on a small scale. On the large scale, the poem has a clear structure. It is organized into five sections, each of which is numbered and labeled, almost in the style of a traditional poem. Yet, in her entry on Eliot for Dictionary of Literary Biography, Jewel Spears Brooker says that these five sections, "by traditional standards, seem unrelated." The key word is "traditional." Part of the joy involved in modernist writing was in not playing by the traditional rules. Still, Eliot did not choose his structure on a whim. In fact, when viewed from a modernist perspective, one that emphasizes the rough sense of the poem, rather than its specific, objectifiable meaning, one can offer up an interpretation for Eliot's choice of large-scale structure.

The first section is "The Burial of the Dead" deals mainly with issues of death. The second section "A Game of Chess" deals mainly with issues of sex. The third section "The Fire Sermon" also deals with sexual issues. The fourth section "Death by Water" deals with issues of death. The final section, "What the Thunder Said," is mainly about resurrection or restoration, which may or may not be attainable. So, if one were to write out these general themes in order, it would go: death, sex, sex, death, possible restoration. One of the first noticeable aspects about this order is that the first four sections are symmetrical. The two sections on death bookend the two sections on sex, almost as if the second two sections are a mirror image of the first two. When a poet deliberately juxtaposes thematic material like this, it usually means something. This is especially true when a modernist poet imposes a distinguishable form on his or her poetry. This ordering of themes becomes even more suspicious when one looks at the length of the fourth section. When compared to the others, this is almost not a section at all. If Eliot had left it out, however, it would have destroyed his symmetry.

So what does this mean? Why is Eliot interested in this symmetry? To answer this question, it is first necessary to examine the small-scale structural techniques that Eliot uses in the poem. Again, if traditional analysis techniques were used, this reader would examine the poem line by line and stanza by stanza, searching for the connections among them. As James S. Torrens notes in his 1997 article on the poem in America: "How many undergraduates since 1922 have sweated their way through this labyrinth and come out dazzled, or completely dazed." The fact is, applying traditional analysis to the poem is a fruitless effort, for the poem exists not in the logical world, but in a world of indefinite reality, which disorients the reader.

But from Eliot's point of view, the reader needs to be disoriented. Society has become too stale and exists in a state of living death, where crowds of these walking dead file off to work, exhaling "Sighs, short and infrequent." Even the sighs of despair and disillusionment are "infrequent," because this society is lost and does not even have the energy to sigh. Eliot is attempting to shake up society and get people to, as he notes during the second section, through the mouthpiece of the rich woman: "Think." To do this, to shake up people and force them to think about the current state of society, Eliot structures his poem in episodes. On the small scale, these episodes help him hook readers, even as he disorients them. Within each section, Eliot divides the narrative into episodes that invoke aspects of the past, the present, and in many cases both. Time and place shift with little or no transition, like the clicks of a camera shutter. And as the poem progresses, Eliot clicks his poetic shutter rapidly, populating his bizarre landscape, his waste land, with a litany of historical and mythological figures. In this surreal, constantly changing setting, Vendler notes that Buddha is juxtaposed "with St. Augustine, and Ovid next to Wagner," illogical placements that defy traditional modes of thought.

This leads back to the reason behind Eliot's conscious choice to include a symmetrical large-scale structure. In the long scope of human history and experience, Buddha and Augustine are linked, as are Ovid and Wagner and the countless other seemingly contradictory pairings in the poem. By choosing Weston's myth of the Fisher King — a seminal myth that is thought to have ultimately influenced many religious stories, including the Christian quest for the Holy Grail — Eliot is indicating that they are one and the same, mirror images of each other. Likewise, Eliot's modern society and the other past societies refered to in the poem are also mirror images of each other, which is why he juxtaposes "Jerusalem" with "London," for example, and ultimately, why he chooses to make the first four sections reflect this mirror image concept.

However, the final section does not fit this symmetry, which makes sense too. This final section is also the most ambiguous. The first four are clearly about either death or sex. The fourth is about restoration, but it leaves the question of possible restoration open-ended, by providing mixed commentary at the end in the foreign phrases. Eliot offers some insight into this with the line directly before these foreign phrases: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Some critics say that this statement is Eliot's introduction to the foreign phrases themselves, which are just fragments of thoughts. Others say that this is Eliot's commentary on the fragmentary nature of the entire poem itself. The latter interpretation seems to make more sense.

In his 1923 review of the poem for New Republic, Conrad Aiken sees the fragmentary, incoherent nature of the poem as its greatest strength and says that the work must be taken as

A brilliant and kaleidoscopic confusion; as a series of sharp, discrete, slightly related perceptions and feelings, dramatically and lyrically presented, and violently juxtaposed, (for effect of dissonance) so as to give us an impression of an intensely modern, intensely literary consciousness which perceives itself to be not a unit but a chance correlation or conglomerate of mutually discolorative fragments.

In other words, while readers familiar with traditional, neatly ordered poetry might look for the poet to tell them what they need to know, Eliot very shrewdly conceals his true thoughts behind his fragmentary structure, which ultimately reflects the chaos of the poet's modern, disillusioned society, even as its links it to humanity's shared past through its use of mirror image. Like the mythical quest hero who must undergo trials and assemble information to earn restoration, Eliot's readers must review the various, fragmentary pieces of the poem and pull from it the ideas that make the most sense to them. The important thing, as Eliot indicates, is to be engaged in this process in the first place. Because when people wake up from their moral stupor and start thinking about the current state of society, then maybe they will also be motivated to work toward improving it.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on "The Waste Land," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2004.

What Do I Read Next?

• Many critics highlight the fact that Eliot wrote The Waste Land while he was suffering a nervous breakdown. Another group of post – World War I writers disillusioned by the war, the surrealists, attempted to create literary works while their minds were in alternative states, a condition often reached by deliberate attempts to affect their consciousness, such as through hypnosis. The Magnetic Fields (1920), a series of prose poems by French poets André Breton and Phillipe Soupault, was created during one of these mental experiments, a marathon project that lasted eight days.
• Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," first published in the magazine Poetry (1915) and later collected in Prufrock, and Other Observations (1917), is considered one of Eliot's most important works. Like The Waste Land, the poem mixes classical references with other modern images. The poem details the ramblings of the title character, a self-doubting man who is pessimistic about his future and the future of society.
• In 1971, Eliot's estate authorized the release of a facsimile edition of the poet's original 800-line version of the poem, entitled, The Waste Land: A Facsimile of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. As the title implies, the book includes the original revision notes from Pound, but it also includes notes from Eliot's first wife and Eliot himself. This landmark edition, which includes an introduction by Eliot's widow, his second wife Valerie Eliot, gave critics and readers insight into the process used to create the 1922 version.
• In his original notes to The Waste Land, Eliot states that he was inspired by Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, which Frazer released in two volumes in 1890, then revised into a one-volume edition in 1922. Although popular in its day, this book, which attempts to explore the origins of magic and religion and their relevance to his modern world, came under critical fire in later years.
• Ernest Hemingway is probably the best known of the Lost Generation group of American writers. Like The Waste Land, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) explores the post – World War I sense of disillusionment. In the novel, the protagonist, Jake Barnes, a World War I veteran, suffers from physical and psychological war wounds that greatly affect his life and view of the world.
• While Ezra Pound is considered one the twentieth century's great writers, he never had a wide reading audience, in part because he spent much of his time helping nurture the fledgling writing careers of Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and others. Yet Pound did produce one series of works, his Cantos, published in various pieces from 1917 to 1968 (for a total of 117 sections), which some consider a masterpiece. Like Eliot's The Waste Land, however, this ambitious work relies on chaotic, disparate techniques that turned off some critics and readers.
• In his notes on The Waste Land, Eliot also cites the influence of Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), a book that explores the Grail legend of King Arthur and its relation to the recorded myths of ancient mystery cults and their fertility rites.