It depicts a culture which is falling apart and no longer understands where it has come from or where it is going, where nothing is admirable or even intelligible, where sexual immorality is commonplace. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” is one of the poem’s most often quoted lines. The 433-line poem creates an overwhelming sense of moral, psychological, cultural, and intellectual chaos with its rapid succession of flickering images, deftly woven together in words of memorable music. It’s a sort of jumble sale of Western culture. He quotes or paraphrases St Augustine, Elizabethan poetry, Sanskrit poetry, 19th century French poetry, a guide to North American birds, German opera, Dante, Antarctic explorers, an Australian pub song, and I’ve left out a lot. The citation from an obscure ancient text is characteristic of Eliot’s technique in “The Waste Land”. The vignettes of characters ancient and modern are mostly about death and desolation. It opens with an epigraph in Latin and Greek from a Latin classic, The Satyricon, written in the first century AD: “I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered: ‘I want to die.’”Īnd that is just the beginning. In 1948 Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Īfter your first reading of “The Waste Land” you may feel that it is almost unbearably bleak. In 1922 “The Waste Land” was exhilaratingly modern and since then, say some critics, nothing more modern has been written. Eliot, a 34-year-old American - although he found Britain so congenial that he spent most of his adult life there and posed as a middle-class Englishman with a bowler hat and rolled-up brolly.Īnalysis of “The Waste Land” would fill a library commentary on his other poetry, plays, and literary criticism, plus endless biographies, would fill several libraries. Yes, 1922 was worse.Īrticulating the dread and despair of the 1920s was a poem aptly named “The Waste Land”. Americans were suffering under Prohibition.
The Bolsheviks were consolidating their rule in Russia after a civil war in which 10 million died. Another 40 million or so died in the Great Influenza Epidemic. The world had just recovered from the First World War, in which 40 million people died. One hundred years ago, the future looked grim.
There are quite a few contenders, but one of them surely is 1922. Chaos in American politics, in British politics.
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