The Waste Land
Name:- Krishna K. Patel
Roll No. :- 16
Batch :- 2018 – 2020
Enrolment no. :- 2069108420190035
Course :- MA English
Paper :- 09 The Modernist English Literature
Topic :- The Waste Land
Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi
Department of English MKBU
The Waste Land
First published in ‘The Criterion’,
‘The Waste Land’ has undoubtedly become the poem most commented upon of all
poetry published during the twentieth century. It certainly occupies a central
position in the discussion of literary Modernism. One of the very first readers
– in fact, almost a co-author Ezra Pound considered it ‘the justification of
the ‘movement’ , of our modern experiment, since 1900.’ However, not all
criticism, was favourable. I.A.Richards
noted in 1926 that Eliot’s poetry, including ‘The Waste Land’, had elicited an
unusual amount of irritated or enthusiastic bewilderment among its readers, and
that the charge most usually brought against Mr Eliot’s poetry is that it is
over – intellectualized. Edmund Wilson also referred to the mixed reception of
‘The Waste Land’, in Axel’s Castle, where he observed that it enchanted and
devastated a whole generation. Wilson interpreted the Waste Land itself as a
symbol borrowed from the myth of the Holy Grail, as ‘a desolate and sterile
country ruled by an impotent king, in which not only have the crops ceased to
grow and the animals to reproduce, but the very human inhabitants have become
incapable of having children. This symbolic interpretation does not exclude
references to the ‘terrible dreariness of the great modern cities, to a place
not merely of desolation, but of anarchy and doubt. Wilson comments on the many
quotations and allusions in the poem and believes that the tendency to echo the
writings reference to more than once. Yet he holds Eliot to have been
effective, precisely where he might be expected to be least original. The
display of erudition and the method of fragmentary allusions did not prevent
Wilson from valuing the poem highly perhaps because he considered Eliot to be a
complete man, characterized by intellectual completeness and soundness.
Leavis expressed himself similarly,
but added some pertinent observations on Eliot’s place in the history of
English literature. He pointed to the ‘urban imagiary’, which, which, as
he remarked, makes Eliot’s poetry contrast
sharply with that of Thomas Hardy. Leavis uses many of the keywords
characteristics of a Modernist world view: detachment, impersonality, the role
of science, cosmopolitanism, consciousness and perception. He has no great
difficulty in arguing that the notion of visual perception is crucial to the
poem, uniting all the rest. What Tiresias sees, in fact is the substance of the
poem, he also rebutted the attempt to read it as an effort to weld various fine
fragments into a metaphysical whole. In rejecting the metaphysical
interpretation and positing that ‘the unity the poem aims at is that of an
inclusive consciousness, Leavis seems to draw a line between a symbolist and a
Modernist reading – although, from hindsight, we would prefer to quality or
delete the adjective ‘inclusive’.
The critical reader may wonder to
what extent the idea that the poem ‘aims at’ unity can be substantiated. Not
only is the biological metaphor misleading
- texts have neither will nor intentions, although their makers may have
them, but one may also questions whether indeed Eliot aimed at unity or rather
at disjointedness. Rather convincingly, Leavis distinguish between the message
and method of fragmentation on the one hand, and the unity of the poem on the
other. Eliot himself wrote that Tiresias is ‘uniting all the rest’, and perhaps wanted
the poem to preserve a certain coherence; but the judgment that the text in
fact presents unity must rely largely on belief, or rather on a convention
stipulating that all literary texts and in particular poetry – are characterized
by a high degree of coherence. Leavi’s assertion that the poem possesses unity
is a proposition which cannot be tested empirically, but which follows directly
from his judgment that The Waste Land remains a great positive achievement, and
one of the first importance for English poetry.
Nevertheless, the idea of the poem as
a unified whole perpetuated itself among the critics, in particular the New
Critics, who in many respects based themselves on a symbolist rather than a
modernist poetics. In one of the most elaborate interpretations of the poem,
Cleanth Brooks, characterized The Waste Land as a unified whole explaining that
it presents a chaotic experience ordered into a new whole, though the realistic
surface of experience is faithfully retained. Here analysis interpretation and
value judgment have been inextricably confounded.
The New Critics’ reading of The Waste
Land inevitably called for a reaction. Leavis was aware that there was only an
‘extremely limited public’ for the poem, but this was no reason for him to
change his positive evaluation. Stephen Spender, writing in 1936 , made a
similar observation which, however, led him to a rather negative value
judgement. According to Spender, Eliot seems to describe the contemporary post
war situation of a certain very small class of intellectuals in Europe and
America. And rather persuasively, he adds that no charwoman or prostitute in
London would recognize herself in the second part of the A Game of Chess
section of The Waste Land. He certainly saw the anti realist purport of the
poem, as appears from his observation that Eliot’s ‘mind is always on the poem,
on what is created by the mind. He never appeals to a material reality outside
the mind. He noticed a link with the French Symbolists, but also observed a
number of features which we would call modernist: ‘Eliot indicates the whole
modern world, but in a subjective way, full of these fragmentary,
intellectualized sense – imprerssions. Eliot is the very opposite of everything
this is that Eliot’s poetry is not a powerful and originating force and that he
has not succeded in forming the kind of synthesis which one finds in James’s
work. Spender was disturbed by the presentation of a closed world in The Waste
Land and perhaps also by the certainly with which the symbol were interpreted
the closed reading.
In our view, the issue of whether the
poem should be regarded as a unified whole is a debatable one – and, as appears
from Spender’s judgement, it was debated. If read as a Modernist text, The
Waste Land could very well be considered an open structure, an incomplete
series of fragments, with pointers to a vast and international cultural
tradition, but without a claim of completeness. I. A. Richards came close to this view when he observed that
‘the poems as a whole may elude us while every fragment, as a fragment, comes
victoriously home. In comformity with the conventional belief that all good
poetry should be coherent, however, most critics claimed that The Waste land
presented a unified whole.
Not only the symbolism, but also the
compositional frame of The Waste Land was provided by an anthropological study
of the Grail legend by Jessie L. Weston. This is what Eliot says in his Notes
on the wate Land. There are two Modernist features here; first the reliance on
intellectual views of rituals, and secondly the explicit metalingual reference to this indebtedness which amounts
to revealing the semantic and compositional code. The major theme of the poem
is the universal opposition in ritual of death or life, drought/water,
decay/fecundity. As with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, there is nothing
typically Modernist in this theme. The invariant opposition of life and death
is common to all epochs, and we should rather look at the way Eliot dealt with
the theme than delve into the anthropological back ground.
The intellectual scaffolding of the poem is
partly broken up by its fragmented organization. The text gives the impression
of being a collage of fragments from different times, different places and
different languages ‘You cannot say, or guess , for you know only/ A heap of
broken images may be considered as providing a metalingual explanation of how
the poem was constructed. The same applies, as Bronzwaer observed, to one of the
last lines. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Yet the poem is
more than a collage of fragments.
Certain themes are dealt with several times in different ways, certain
words are repeated, certain other words have been prompted by preceding ones
for phonemic reasons, and family, as Richards points out, there is the effect
of the rhythm which also connects the various fragments. Moreover, the poem has
been divided into five parts, which are interrelated the Unreal City, for instance, appears in lines 60, 207
and 376 the undone of line of line 64 recurs as
‘undid’ in line 294; the title of section 4, death by water is
announced in line 55 as well as by the
title of section 1; I was fishing is repeated as I sat upon the shore/ Fishing
,etc. The fragments are kept together by repetition, parallelism and reference
to earlier poems by Eliot as well as to a large stock of half – forgotten
traditional texts. This brings us back to the problem of coherence , which has
to remain undecided for want of a workable definition of that term.
The treatment of the same theme in
different ways which allow for minor or major qualifications strikes us as a
modernist device. The poem contains several stories of sexual love and death.
The epigraph contains a reference to the death wish of the Sibly, the section
on the Unreal City describes both London and Dante’s Inferno, in section 4 the
drowning of Phlebas the Phoenician is related, and there are numerous shorter
references to death.
With The Hollow Men a new stage in
Eliot’s poetry begins. The vocabulary is still partly Modernist, but the
monotonous repetition – particularly in the last stanza – has no connections
with the Modernist repetition particularly in the last stanza- has no connection
with the moderenist code. Whereas a Modernist reading of The Waste Land is
rather convincing and may eliminate difficulties which cannot be solved by a
different decoding, a Modernist interpretations of The Hallow Men solves very
little.
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