39 pages • 1 hour read
T. S. EliotThe Waste Land
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Loss of Civilization
The Waste Land is an unapologetically ambitious poem, a public poem in which Eliot—like many of the modernists—perceived the function of the Poet, capital P, not as some transcriber of private confessional emotions but rather as a priest with a wide-lens perception of the era. The Poet, then, is commissioned by virtue of that perception to perform a public role: the responsibility to direct, guide, and minister to a wounded and troubling society, to deliver, as part of that imperative, difficult insights about itself. People live in a waste land and do not even know it, the poet says. Come, the poet invites, and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Line 30). Although every generation since antiquity thinks it is the world’s last, for Eliot, the evidence that Western civilization was lost was compelling. Eliot, whose vast education grounded him in the wide-ranging study of Western civilization, perceived in his moment clear indications of Western civilization’s undeniable lapse into fragmentation, moral dissolution, spiritual drift, and psychological paralysis. In this, Eliot assumes the role of prophet—a visionary cursed with insight, able to see what others blithely ignore.
The pointless slaughter of The Great War, the widespread concession to materialism at the expense of pursuing the spiritual, the too-rapid rise of industrialism that diminished the individual into a cog within a vast and whirling complex, and the troubling turn to selfishness all indicated to Eliot that civilization itself had been lost. Eliot could not forecast what would next come. The waste land vision is a symbolic, surreal realization of that lost civilization—a broken and desolate landscape of sterility and despair: “Here is no water but only rock/Rock and no water and the sandy road / The road winding above among the mountains / If there were water we should stop and drink” (Lines 331-33). In the closing section, he even touches on each of the great empires of Western civilization only to find each in apocalyptic ruin: little left “[c]racks and reforms and bursts in the violent air / Falling towers” (Lines 372-73). For Eliot, it is nothing less than Western civilization’s endgame.
The Importance of Culture
If Western civilization itself is in a spiral of collapse, the poem suggests that the power and longevity of that civilization has long been expressed in its cultural artifacts—a layer of community expression that bonded nations and peoples across geopolitical borders and forged a commonality of expression all but lost in a generation indifferent to its own cultural history.
The poem is threaded with hundreds of allusions to classical works of mythology and folklore, Elizabethan literature, wisdom writings of antiquity, the Bible and other seminal Western theological works, as well as to opera, architecture, art, and sculpture. To assist his reader in appreciating the depth of the poem’s use of cultural artifacts, Eliot actually provided an extensive appendix to the first edition that listed in exhaustive length the works from which Eliot drew.
Thus, these fragments of cultural expressions, these allusions that create the texture of the poem are not there to baffle the reader or to frustrate engagement with the poem. Eliot is not showing off. He is not mocking readers’ confusion, or intimidation by the plethora of references. What he targets, however, is a reader’s indifference. The appendix testifies to Eliot’s interest in encouraging rather than discouraging readers to tap into their own all but lost culture. That the fragments create the poem’s whole, that the fragments sufficiently cohere to sustain the poem itself accentuates the poem’s wider theme: Cultural artifacts—the sublime expressions of the civilization’s greatest and most generous minds—create the unity and force of a culture. Paintings, music, literature, religions, architecture, myths create community, holds a culture together. The poem thus becomes a defiant assertion of the theme itself even as it portrays a London indifferent to its cultural roots and more interested in ragtime than Wagner, more enthralled by cheap melodramas than Shakespeare, more hip to snappy singsong refrains of low-brow poetry than, well, Eliot. In culture, the poet and the reader find common ground, and rediscover their shared culture.
The Problem of Loneliness
Although each of the characters in the poem yearns for connection, dreams of romance and love, understands the idea of the vitality of relationships, and in several cases are actually waiting for their lovers to arrive, the love for which they settle is absent emotional energy lacking any spiritual dimension. Love is perverted into the simulation of closeness suggested by the bleak indulgence of the sexual act itself. The characters Eliot creates are entombed in loneliness and a sense of cloaking isolation they personally create by clinging to their ego, fearing the loss of self implicit in the commitment of love. They suffice on yearning, make due with loneliness, clinging to dreams and illusions. Lil in “A Game of Chess” caters to her husband’s voracious and self-centered sexual appetite despite the risks to her. The office stenographer in “The Fire Sermon,” is relieved when her lover finally departs, as their rendezvous is more a chance for him to puff up his ego. London is swarmed with crowds—lost individuals both a part of the teeming city and apart in their own claustrophobic worlds of isolation.
In the bar in “A Game of Chess,” the weary bartender keeps announcing as in a refrain that the bar is closing, that it is time to break up the convivial atmosphere created by the drunken crowd. It is time, symbolically, to return to the hard shell of the self. Love, hymned in the works of Western civilization that thread the poem, is gone. In its place are couples that cannot communicate, love that is only manifested in pointless and selfish carnality, and human relationships lost to the pull of the self. The poem offers no simple prescription for the nagging angst of loneliness, only the weight of evidence of lives, rich and poor, male and female, indifferent to the heart, alienated from the tonic experience of love. At the heart of Eliot’s vision remains a feeling of existential aloneness—that no matter how close a person moves to another, that connection will always be ironically defined by the nearness of distance or, more exactly, by the distance of nearness.
Related Titles
By T. S. Eliot
