T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, is considered one of (if not) the most defining pieces of literature of the Modernism movement. In it he captures the feelings of pain, horror and confusion experienced by the survivors of WWI and the apathy they felt afterwards. While the content of each section of this masterwork is worth many essays unto themselves, for the purposes of this essay, we will be focusing on the title of each section and how it pertains to its respective part, the other section titles, and what it contributes to the poem as a whole.
The Burial of the Dead begins the poem, and according to author Robert S. Lehman, indicates that perhaps Eliot realized how profound the Modernist movement was going to be – forever changing the landscape of literature for the worse. Lehman presents a rather intriguing argument:
“What characterizes the modern waste land if not an ineluctable passage from the high to the low, from the first appearance of superior art to its digestion by a mediocre culture and its return in a fallen form? Everything in the waste land--all of literary history--returns degraded. The problem extends beyond mass culture's consumption, digestion, and excretion of formerly great works; to recollect literary history at all is to risk being implicated in the same crimes.” (72)
In any case, be it based in anger at the looming loss of High Art, or the loss of morality because of WWI, the ‘corpse in the garden’ (Eliot 476) represents the spread of decay.
A Game of Chess serves to reflect the fragmented state of literature popularized by Modernism. The odd conversation that takes place in this section continuously assaults the reader’s senses with descriptive imagery. The reader is then treated to a rather disembodied conversation that could be voices of the living, or those of the dead, Eliot never clarifies for the reader. This conversation then comes to an abrupt end when everyone is wished “goodnight” (479) which “signal[s] the ironic yet despairing tone of Eliot's interruption of the previous (unconsciously tragic) discourse, by a deeper authorial consciousness” (Johnson 432).
The last three sections are thematically bound to one another in their use of the elements in their titles The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, and What the Thunder Said (representing Air), and hearken back the poem’s first section, The Burial of the Dead (which represents Earth). Eliot’s use of elemental symbolism in this poem allows it to find firm roots in the reader’s reality, yet it juxtaposes the natural (elements) with the quasi-mystical “Unreal City” (Eliot 480). In forcing this acknowledgement of the unnatural (‘Unreal City’), the death and destruction (both found in nature) committed there are inextricably bound to the unnatural, making them familiar and foreign – thus, becoming a source of discomfort and unease for the reader.
Eliot’s The Wasteland is an interesting literary work for the reader to try to understand. Just the implications of the headings themselves raise many questions into what he was really writing about, be it the travesties of WWI, the loss of morality, or the loss of High Art. In any case, this poem stands apart from its counterparts of the Modern Movement.
Eliot, T.S. “The Wasteland.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1. 3rd ed. Eds. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Claire. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2003. 474-487.
Lehman, Robert S. “Eliot's Last Laugh: The Dissolution of Satire in "The Waste Land."’Journal of Modern Literature 32.2. 2009. 65-79. Academic ASAP. Web. 10 April 2010. http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AIM&docId=A196151643&source=gale&srcprod=AIM&userGroupName=tall85761&version=1.0
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