September 26 is T.S. Eliot's birthday (1888) and in celebration, I'm posting sections from a paper I got a real kick out of writing -- it was on "The Waste Land." Enjoy the chunks and then go out and read more Eliot!
There is so much to be learned when a poem is unlocked. The 433 lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” haunts readers and critics alike. It’s an undeniable hallmark of Modern poetry and it’s ambiguity and fragmentation create much opportunity for those willing to delve into the rich work.
The poem was written amidst the Modern Art movement and the social trauma experienced as a result of World War I. It is a reflection of its time. The poem is confusing and chaotic, not only by its shifty and amorphous “I,” but also by it’s mosaic quality and garbled sense of time. Essentially, the poem is a collection of fragments that, when digested together, reveal a jumbled and confused outlook of the early 20th century.
Eliot’s contemporaries in the visual arts influenced “The Waste Land’s” fragmentation. In the early 1900s, artists were experimenting with the notions of Cubism and Surrealism. These movements aimed to deconstruct form and reality and to embrace a chaotic sensibility. Some scholars claim that “The Waste Land” is the quintessential Surrealist poem because it’s broken into a multitude of fragments. Only when these fragments are taken as a whole do they create an impression of the world or reality. The result is a dreamlike quality.
Tour Eiffel aux arbres by Robert Delaunay is a great example of Cubism.
The influence of Cubism runs strong in the poem as well. A Cubist painter examines his model or inspiration from a multitude of angles and then merges the various views into a single image. Eliot does the same with his fragments in “The Waste Land.” The poet doesn’t just limit himself to a single point of view, a specific time, or place in the poem. Eliot captures many viewpoints and provides them all.
Published in 1922, “The Waste Land” emerged four years after World War I, yet the psychological toll of the war was still apparent. Society’s psyche had taken a tremendous blow, leaving masses of people anxious and hopeless. I read that between 1914 and 1918, eight and a half million soldiers were killed. Additionally, thirteen million civilians died because of massacres, military battles, starvation, exposure and the world’s most destructive outbreak of influenza. Obviously, Eliot and his generation were shrouded in melancholy and this obviously influenced “The Waste Land.”
The poems’ fragmentation parallels the sense of devastation prevalent during the time it was written, and mimics the symptoms of shell shock. Shell shock is considered the signature injury among soldiers of World War I. Helmets were not introduced until two years into the war effort and hordes of soldiers were exposed to exploding ordnances and the horrors of trench warfare. The result was a tremendous population of soldiers afflicted by traumatic brain injuries that had mysterious symptoms and no cure.
In “A Game of Chess,” this shell shock sense of paranoia, anxiety, and sensitivity to noise is most prevalent. Eliot would have been very familiar with this condition at the time he wrote the poem. According to psychologists that penned “Shell Shock and Traumatic Brain Injury,” ten percent of British battle casualties were categorized as some form of shell shock. By 1917, shell shock was responsible for one-seventh of all discharges from the British Army. These facts demonstrate the catastrophic impact this type of injury had on British society, and explains why these symptoms bled into poetry crafted in the early 20th century.
It will be interesting to note whether there is a resurgence of fragmentation in the poetry of our time. Growing discontent over the American war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with a resurgence of traumatic brain injury among soldiers returning from the war, could create an atmosphere similar to the one in which Eliot was writing nearly one hundred years ago.
“The Waste Land” — the poem’s title refers to a barren land, void of life. However, the poem is rife with possibility. The poem contradicts itself continuously and through it’s chaotic nature, some sort of order emerges. The poem speaks to its time and the social fiber in which it was created.
