T.S.Eliot's the Waste Land
How are issues of faith or belief represented in T.S.Eliot 's The Waste Land?
Faith and belief, or the lack of it, has always played a major part in T.S. Eliot’s canon; perhaps more than any other Modernist writer, Eliot reflects the zeitgeist that was described by Spears Brooker (1994) as “characterized by a collapse of faith in human innate goodness and in the inevitability of progress.” (Brooker Spears, 1994, p.61) To this end, this paper looks at how such issues are represented in Eliot’s early work The Waste Land (1989) that, as we shall see, can be thought of as paradigmatic of both Modernist notions of the role of faith in society and Eliot’s own relationship to an increasingly orthodox spirituality.
As Hugh Kenner (1965) details, issues of faith and belief, in The Waste Land, are inextricably linked with that other depiction of European decay Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1994):
“It had for an epitaph a phrase from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (“The horror! The horror!”); embedded in the text were a glimpse, borrowed from Conrad’s opening page, of the red sails of barges drifting in the Thames Estuary, and a contrasting reference to the “the heart of light”.
Like Conrad’s novel, Eliot’s poem depicts the gradual decay of Judeo-Christian European society from the inside; the opening imagery of The Waste Land contributes to the over all sense of a fetid, past glory that is no longer relevant and that is no longer able to sustain life:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of the stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter”
Of course we are reminded here of both Christ’s temptation (Luke, 4:2) and of the passages in Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1994, p.60) that deal with the kinds of severe drought that inspires the rain-dance mythologies in many indigenous cultures. Throughout the first section of the poem,
Faith and belief, or the lack of it, has always played a major part in T.S. Eliot’s canon; perhaps more than any other Modernist writer, Eliot reflects the zeitgeist that was described by Spears Brooker (1994) as “characterized by a collapse of faith in human innate goodness and in the inevitability of progress.” (Brooker Spears, 1994, p.61) To this end, this paper looks at how such issues are represented in Eliot’s early work The Waste Land (1989) that, as we shall see, can be thought of as paradigmatic of both Modernist notions of the role of faith in society and Eliot’s own relationship to an increasingly orthodox spirituality.
As Hugh Kenner (1965) details, issues of faith and belief, in The Waste Land, are inextricably linked with that other depiction of European decay Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1994):
“It had for an epitaph a phrase from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (“The horror! The horror!”); embedded in the text were a glimpse, borrowed from Conrad’s opening page, of the red sails of barges drifting in the Thames Estuary, and a contrasting reference to the “the heart of light”.
Like Conrad’s novel, Eliot’s poem depicts the gradual decay of Judeo-Christian European society from the inside; the opening imagery of The Waste Land contributes to the over all sense of a fetid, past glory that is no longer relevant and that is no longer able to sustain life:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of the stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter”
Of course we are reminded here of both Christ’s temptation (Luke, 4:2) and of the passages in Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1994, p.60) that deal with the kinds of severe drought that inspires the rain-dance mythologies in many indigenous cultures. Throughout the first section of the poem,
Cited: Ackroyd, P (1984), T.S. Eliot, London: Abacus. Bentley, J and Spears Brooker, J (1990), Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts. Childs, D (2001), Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conrad, J (1994), Heart of Darkness, London: Penguin. Dick, B (1986), ‘The Waste Land and the Descensus ad Inferos’, published in Bloom, H (ed), T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, London: Chelsea, pp.67-81. Eliot, T.S (1989), The Waste Land, published in The Complete Poems and Plays, London: Faber and Faber, pp.59-80. Frazer, J (1994), The Golden Bough, London: Wordsworth. Jay, G (1986), ‘Discovering the Corpus’, published in Bloom (1986), pp. 115-137. Kenner, H (1965), The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, London: Methuen. Lyotard, J.F (2000), The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Maxwell, D (1960), The Poetry of T.S. Eliot, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Spears Booker, J (1994), Mastery and Escape: T.S Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts. Yeats, W. B (1987), ‘The Second Coming’, published in Collected Poems, London: Papermac, pp.210-111. Further Reading Grant, M (1997), T.S Kenner, H (1962), T.S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, London: Prentice Hall. Lucy