T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' as a Window to Modern Lit

THE WASTE LAND AS A WINDOW TO MODERN LITERATURE
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The Waste Land as a Window to Modern Literature
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land can be considered as a window to the modern literature,
which is meant to be the literary works written in the modern time starting from the
beginning of the twentieth century. The poem can serve as a window to the modern literature
from different points of view and various aspects. Many critics have observed the issue that
The Waste Land is the model of modern poetry, while others consider it to be the beginning
of modern literature. Aspects of similarities might provide a proof of the matter that The
Waste Land can be observed as a concrete representation of the modern literature. The poem
has been the result of different modern influences, which count for its being a form of
modern poetry. The main features of the poem are those of the modern literary works. For
different reasons The Waste Land can be seen as a WINDOW for modern literature.
This research work tackles the issue of 'The Waste Land as a window to the modern literature'
from different points of view. It provides a general overview of The Waste Land as an
introductory text to the paper. This research work provides an account about the views of the
critics on The Waste Land which support the view that The Waste Land is the model of
modern literature, through which the modern literary works might be seen and understood in
terms of its spirit and style. Some account is provided in this work as a matter of illustration
of how the poem has influenced modern criticism. The dominant views and themes in the
modern literature are discussed in this work to illustrate how this poem is observed as a
window of the modern literary works. Points of similarities count as matters of illustration
that proves The Waste Land as a poem serving as a window for modern literature. The
research tackles different aspects from different point of view to illustrate how The Waste
Land can be observed as a window to the modern literature.
The views of the critics, discussed in this research, have in common one concept which is the
fact that The Waste Land is a model of modern literature in terms of style and motif, or theme
if it might be a more appropriate term. The views of the critics show how the development of
modern poetry, in particular and literature in general, has taken place after the publication of
this poem. The dominant pessimistic feelings of the age are seen as the spirit of the age; these
pessimistic feelings are observed heavily through the poem. The critics agree, unanimously,

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that the poem is a distinguished poem in the modern time and is standing as model of modern
literature.
Each age is characterized by certain views held by its literary writers, and the modern age,
also, has its distinguished views that make it different from the other periods of literature.
Among those views, there are common and dominant views which are agreed upon by the
writers. Such agreed-upon views are tackled in The Waste Land as in different major and
famous works in the modern time and literature. As The Waste Land discusses these
dominant views of the age, it might be observed that it, The Waste Land, shows a clear
minimized picture of the spirit of modern literature.
Historical events have their influence and clear effect on the literary works of their ages; the
modern time is, no less, one of those ages in which the historical events play an important
role in the themes of its literature. Movements, also, have their influence on the themes of the
literary works. The influence of two world wars in the twentieth century is observed heavily
in the modern literary works. Such, direct and indirect, consequences of the historical events
influencing the themes of the modern literary works can be seen in the major literary works
of the age. The Waste Land, as a poem characterized by multiplicity of themes, compromises
these modern themes that have the impression of the modern age. Such themes are observed
in The Waste Land and a comparison is drawn between this poem and any other modern
literary work from the point of view of these themes. Similarities of themes and scenes might
be a good illustration of the reason why The Waste Land is considered as a window to the
modern literature.
'The Waste Land as a window to modern literature' is a point of view that has its reasons and
support not only in this research paper but also among a great number of critics. Illustrations
for this point of view are drawn from different points of view, like: previous views of critics,
the style of the poem, the major modern features of the poem, the views held in the poem and
the different themes tackled in the poem. Some other aspects might be observed in any future
study on this regard. However, this study focuses on proving The Waste Land as a window to
the modern literature from the points of view mentioned above.

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Introduction to Eliot's The Waste Land
T.S Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is acknowledged as the most influential poem of the 20th
century. It is perhaps the most important, most acclaimed and venerated piece of modern
verse in the English language. Its author, T S Eliot, is held in equally high regard in the
literary world as the poet who most influenced and changed the nature of poetry and literary
criticism in the modern world. After much controversy over his poetry in the 1920s his
reputation gained ground and his influence firmly asserted its authority in the 1930s. He,
T.S. Eliot, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 'for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer
of modern poetry', which might be an indication for Eliot as the man of modern literature.
The modernist poetry forsook the kind of ‘poetic’ language of the 19th century bringing into
the verse quite a bit of plain talk in ordinary language. Expressions, turns of phrase, the way
the lines of the poem were organised, an appearance that would have seemed prosaic as well
as other modes of expression that broke long-held conventions were commonplace in the new
poem. Many of these upset the complacency of the society in 1922. However, it did not take
long for the critics and the audience to realize that poetry had changed and that this great
poem had in fact set new standards.
The use of various forms of free verse, in which the rhythm of speech and thought patterns,
rather than measured metre or conventional versification determine the length of lines and the
rhythmic movement of the poem, is now commonplace and taken for granted. But Eliot uses
it casually in the poem. This is a feature of modernism in poetry.
As stated above, The Waste Land holds the unique distinction because in 1922 it changed the
state of poetry. Although The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock had created some ripples
before it, The Waste Land utterly transformed the conventional poetry as it was known
previously and established what is known as 'Modern Poetry'; in particular it fixed the styles
known as 'modernist' verse. Another great figure in this new movement was the poet Ezra
Pound who published Eliot’s first poem and gave him much editorial advice on Waste Land.

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As stated earlier, with the publication of The Waste Land, modernist poetry appeared to have
made a breakthrough into wider critical discourse and a broader readership, however, the
economic collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s had a serious negative impact on the new
writing.
It is known that The Waste Land is a 433-line Modernist poem. It has been called "one of the
most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between
satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its
elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and
literatures—the poem has become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its
famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a
handful of dust"; and (its last line) the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih
shantih."
It is argued that the most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this post-
war disillusionment is T. S. Eliot's epic "The Waste Land" (1922). Eliot was an American
poet who had been living in London for some time. Although he was never formally
associated with the Imagist group, his work was admired by Pound, who, in 1915, helped him
publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which brought him to prominence. When
Eliot had completed his original draft of a long poem based on both the disintegration of his
personal life and mental stability, and the culture around him, he gave the manuscript,
provisionally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices", to Pound for comment. After
some heavy editing, "The Waste Land" in the form in which we now know it was published,
and Eliot came to be seen as the voice of a generation. The addition of notes to the published
poem served to highlight the use of collage as a literary technique, paralleling similar practice
by the cubists and other visual artists. From this point on, modernism in English tended
towards a poetry form of the fragment that rejected the idea that the poet could present a
comfortingly coherent view of life.

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The Waste Land, for many reasons, is considered as the most important literary work of the
modern time and the touchstone of modern poetry. This poem is argued to lack unity, as its
author sates that poetry must have the criterion of unity, however, unity is observed in this
poem as Eliot states that all the speakers are from the point of view of Tiresias; Dr. Rakesh
observes this point stating that "such unity of poetry can be observed through this matter; as
Tiresias represents the unification of speakers, themes are unified the same way as they are
what he (means Tiresias) sees". Thus, The Waste Land is the model of modern poetry.s

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Recent Discussions/Arguments/Ideas Supporting the Argument that 'The
Wasteland as a Window for Modern Literature'
This part of the study details the previous discussions and points of view discussed by
the student conducting this paper, Ayman Al-Ashmory, or those points discussed in the
lectures intended for MA students. This part includes issues related to the language of the
poem, movements related to it, introductory overview to the themes, and so on. These points
were found and discussed before conducting this research paper they are mentioned in this
context to show how this idea developed. One of the main reasons for its development is the
support of Dr. Rakesh who has drawn different points that suggest the matter that the idea is
counted as a significant observation on The Waste Land.
T. S Eliot's The Waste Land is known as the most important poem in the twentieth
century. This poem has marked the line of new English poetry. This poem influenced not
only poets but also critics. The New Criticism is an approach of criticism which flourished
after the publication of The Waste Land as its source of theory. It might be argued, however,
that this poem is observed as a window to modern literature. The Waste Land as a window to
modern English literature is observed through many aspects.
From the Point of View of its Style:
It might be said that The Waste Land is an example of the modern poetry because it makes
use of a wide range of metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, as well as techniques for
structuring free verse. Although the effect appeared chaotic to some of Eliot’s first readers,
the poem fulfills Pound’s dictum that “Rhythm must have meaning” (1915). Later poetic
practice was largely shaped by Pound’s advocacy of free verse and Eliot’s example.

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A Detailed Description of the Style of the poem:
Like many modernists, Eliot was highly self-conscious about his relationship to literary
tradition. In a well-known essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), Eliot described
how the modern poet, when truly original, enters into a dialogue with tradition. He claimed
that a great poem makes it necessary to understand all earlier poetry of the same tradition in a
new light.
A brief survey of the allusions in the first section of The Waste Land shows some of Eliot’s
techniques for incorporating fragments of tradition into his own work. Aided by Eliot’s own
notes and comments, scholars have identified allusions in this first section of 76 lines to: the
Book of Common Prayer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Rupert Brooke, Walt Whitman, Théophile
Gautier, Charles-Louis Philippe, James Thomson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Countess Marie
Larisch, Wyndham Lewis, nine books of the Bible, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
Richard Wagner, Sappho, Catullus, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, J. G.
Frazer, Jessie L. Weston, W. B. Yeats, Shakespeare, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelaire, Dante,
Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and John Webster—about one allusion every two lines. These
allusions are in fact heavily weighted towards the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Eliot’s immediate precursors, but they include several ancient, medieval, and Renaissance
sources, thus establishing a retrospective tradition that seems to run, say, from Sappho down
to Pound, Eliot’s friend and mentor, who himself drastically edited the manuscript of The
Waste Land and arranged for its publication in The Dial. Eliot’s technique of allusion serves
various functions: to give symbolic weight to the poem’s contemporary material, to
encourage a sort of free association in the mind of the reader, and to establish a tone of
pastiche, seeming to collect all the bric-a-brac of an exhausted civilization into one giant, foul
rag and bone shop.
The first lines of the poem position it as a monument in a specifically English tradition by
alluding to Geoffrey Chaucer, the first major poet of the English language, whom Dryden
called “the Father of English Poetry.” Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales begins with a description
of April’s “sweet showers,” which cause the flowers of spring to grow. The natural cycle of

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death and rebirth traditionally associated with the month of April appears tragic to Eliot’s
speaker:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
For Eliot’s speaker, April’s showers are cruel, not sweet. The “us” in line 5—“Winter kept us
warm”—seems to link the poet himself to the earth that is covered with snow. These opening
lines, then, pose the question of the poet’s originality in relation to a tradition that seems
barely capable of nourishing the “dull roots” of the modern poet’s sensibility. The poet lives
in a modern waste land, in the aftermath of a great war, in an industrialized society that lacks
traditional structures of authority and belief, in soil that may not be conducive to new growth.
Even if he could become inspired, however, the poet would have no original materials to
work with. His imagination consists only of “a heap of broken images,” in the words of line
22, the images he inherits from literary ancestors going back to the Bible. The modernist
comes to write poetry after a great tradition of poetry has been all but tapped out. Despite this
bleakness, however, the poem does present a rebirth of sorts, and the rebirth, while signifying
the recovery of European society after the war, also symbolizes the renewal of poetic
tradition in modernism, accomplished in part by the mixing of high and low culture and the
improvisational quality of the poem as a whole.
The poet’s struggle to make a new poem out of the inherited language of tradition seems to
be mirrored in the unevenness of the poem’s language and form. The opening lines vary
between five and nine syllables each. Five of the seven lines end with a single verb in
participial form, following a comma (which marks a caesura, or pause, in the poem’s
rhythm). These lines seem uneven—as if the poet had started to write iambic pentameter but
not completed the lines or as if he had intended to write shorter lines with three or four beats

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each but felt compelled to add the words that appear after the commas. Each of the participles
introduces an enjambment—in which a unit of meaning carries beyond a line-ending into the
next line. The poem makes sparing use of end-rhyme, which is associated with completion
and closure. Yet the participial verb forms that end five of the first seven lines perform
something like the function of rhyme, linking together the various underground motions of
winter and spring: breeding, mixing, stirring, covering, feeding: indeed, “breeding” and
“feeding” do rhyme. Eliot also makes use of alliteration—the repetition of consonants—in
phrases such as “lilacs out of the dead land,” “mixing / Memory,” “Winter kept us warm,” and
“a little life.” Alliteration is an older poetic technique than rhyme and typical of Old English
poetry, which, like these lines, was heavily accented. Eliot adopted these Old English poetic
techniques from Pound, who had translated the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” into
alliterative modern English. They suggest that Eliot is drawing on resources even older than
Chaucer’s Middle English. Even as he describes the decay of modern civilization, he seeks
power in the primitive resources of the English language. The caesuras and enjambment give
the verse a ritual air, as if we were witnessing a “rite of spring,” such as Stravinsky celebrated
before the war. The title of this first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” from the funeral
service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, reinforces this ritual quality. The participial
phrases emphasize the continual activity that underlies the winter’s “forgetful snow” and the
spring’s “dead land”: life is breeding and stirring; dry roots are soaking up water; the
emotions of the past and the future, memory and desire, are mixing in the rebirth of spring.
Something is germinating.
For Eliot’s speaker, this rebirth is cruel, because any birth reminds him of death. The soil out
of which the spring plants grow is composed of the decayed leaves of earlier plants. April is
the month of Easter, and Eliot is invoking here both the Christian story of the young god who
dies in order to give new life to the rest of us and the many other versions of this myth
chronicled by Sir James Frazer in his anthropological work The Golden Bough and Jessie
Weston in her From Ritual to Romance. Frazer and Weston explored the links among the
mythology of the ancient near east, the Christ story, fertility rites, folk customs like May Day,
and degenerate modern forms of magic such as the Tarot deck. What made Frazer’s and
Weston’s discoveries shocking to some of their first readers was the evidence that many
Christian myths and rituals had their origins in ancient, pagan forms of magic. Eliot was
particularly interested in the myth of the Fisher King, most famously embodied in the

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Arthurian story of the quest for the holy grail. The Fisher King is impotent, his lands infertile
and drought-stricken; one cause of this infertility is a crime, the rape of some maidens in the
King’s court. Only the arrival of a pure-hearted stranger (Perceval, Gawain, or Galahad in
different versions of the Arthurian tales) permits the land to become fertile again. Weston
emphasized the sexual symbolism of the story, notably the grail (a cup said to have been used
at the last supper) and the lance (said to have pierced Christ’s side), which can be interpreted
as symbols of the female and male genitalia. This suggests ancient practices of imitative
magic, including ritual marriages intended to encourage the plants to grow; Frazer thought
that the tradition of the May Queen and King derived from such rites. Much of the symbolism
of The Waste Land suggests these ancient fertility rites, but always gone awry, particularly in
such modern instances as the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, whom Eliot drew from Crome
Yellow (1921), a satirical novel by the young Aldous Huxley.
Many myths attribute the death of winter and the rebirth of spring to the death and rebirth of a
god with human attributes, who in some ancient practices is a man ritually murdered and in
others an effigy buried or thrown into the sea to guarantee fertility or to bring rain. In The
Waste Land, however, the god himself is conspicuously absent, except in debased forms like
the (missing) Hanged Man in the Tarot pack or the drowned Phoenician Sailor, who returns
as “Phlebas the Phoenician” in the fourth section, “Death by Water.” Other, more modern
versions of the Christ story find a place in the poem. The Waste Land echoes Whitman’s
“When Lilacs last in the Door-Yard Bloomed” (1865), in which Whitman makes use of a
similar mythology to commemorate Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated at the end of the
American civil war on Good Friday, 1865. Eliot probably also had Rupert Brooke’s poem
“The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (1912), in mind; it begins, “Just now the lilac is in bloom.”
Brooke himself combined the roles of poet and martyr when he was transformed into a
mythical figure of the English "poet-soldier" after his death. In the more immediate past, W.
B. Yeats had recently published “Easter, 1916,” celebrating the martyrs of the Easter
rebellion. Chaucer drew on this same mythological structure in the Canterbury Tales: his
pilgrims are headed to Canterbury, “the holy, blissful martyr for to seek, / He who hath
helped them when they were sick.” Eliot would later write a play, Murder in the Cathedral
(1935), about the death of Thomas à Becket, Chaucer’s “holy, blissful martyr.” Spring, the
season of rebirth, is also a season for celebrating martyrs, and Eliot’s speaker seems to align
himself with such martyrs as Christ, Becket, Lincoln, Brooke, and the war dead.

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The poem ultimately does promise a new beginning, but Eliot’s speaker appears, perversely,
to prefer winter to spring, and thus to deny the joy and beauty associated with rebirth. He
emphasizes the role of death and decay in the process of growth, most memorably in the
conversation between two veterans who meet near London bridge after the war: “‘Stetson! /
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! / ‘That corpse you planted last year in your
garden, / ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed
its bed?’” The war is the essential background to the poem, but instead of referring to it
directly, Eliot alludes to the battle of Mylae in the Punic Wars of the third century B.C.E.,
suggesting that all wars are in reality one war. The fact that the first world war was fought not
primarily on ships but in trenches is expressed only indirectly through the idea of the
sprouting corpse, which seems a grotesque parody of Brooke’s image of the foreign burial
plot (in "The Soldier") as “forever England." Similarly, the poem’s “rats’ alley” owes
something to the rats that appear in poetry about trench warfare by such soldier-poets as
Siegfried Sassoon. Later, Eliot casually introduces the minor character Albert, Lil’s husband,
a demobilized soldier. History enters the poem not as a subject for direct treatment but
through snatches of overheard dialogue.
In the first section of the poem, “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot adapts some of the crucial
imagery of the poem—the rocky, deserted land, the absence of life-giving water, the dead or
dying vegetation—from the Biblical books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Ecclesiastes. Other
quotations or translations come from writers of near-sacred status: Shakespeare (“Those are
pearls that were his eyes,” line 48) and Dante (“I had not thought death had undone so many.
/ Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled,” lines 63-4). Eliot helpfully, if somewhat
pedantically, included a set of notes on the poem that allowed even his early readers to
identify the sources of these allusions, although he later ridiculed his own notes as “a
remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship.” The notes themselves are an indication of what
is new about the poem. Previous poets would have assumed that their readers shared a
common culture with themselves and would probably have alluded only to materials from
that common culture. Eliot inherits from the symbolists a concern with private, esoteric
meanings, but he adds a structure of notes in order to make some of those meanings
accessible to his readers. The Bible, Shakespeare, and Dante obviously provide historical and
aesthetic ballast for Eliot’s apparently chaotic modern poem, but other types of allusion seem
more bizarre. Many of the quotations appear in foreign languages, such as the lines from

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Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1857-59), a legendary story of adultery which helps Eliot to
establish the theme of frustrated or misdirected sexuality. While occasionally quoting his
favorite modern French poets, including Baudelaire, he also includes passages of everyday
conversation, such as the snippets in lines 8 to 16 from the reminiscences of Countess Marie
Larisch, the niece of the former Empress of Austria and a fashionable contemporary of Eliot.
Eliot’s use of allusion and quotation seems in part a response to the dilemma of coming at the
end of a great tradition. The poet seeks to address modern problems—the war,
industrialization, abortion, urban life—and at the same time to participate in a literary
tradition. His own imagination resembles the decaying land that is the subject of the poem:
nothing seems to take root among the stony rubbish left behind by old poems and scraps of
popular culture. The method of assembling “fragments” or “broken images” from the past
into a sort of mosaic allows him at once to suggest parallels between contemporary problems
and earlier historical situations and to disorient the reader, turning the reading process into a
model of modern, urban confusion. It parallels the cubist use of collage, calling attention to
the linguistic texture of the poem itself and to the materials—literary and popular—out of
which it is constructed. Eliot’s allusive method is a distinctive feature of his poetry, but he
developed it in part on the model of some of Pound’s earlier poems, and Pound’s editing of
The Waste Land greatly increased its fragmentation. An even more important influence was
Joyce. Eliot read the early episodes of Ulyssesthat appeared in the Little Review; as assistant
editor at The Egoist, he read the original drafts of five episodes that were published there in
1919. He also read other parts of the novel in manuscript and corresponded with Joyce about
it. He later confessed to having felt that Joyce’s Ulysses did “superbly” what Eliot himself
was “tentatively attempting to do, with the usual false starts and despairs.” Allusion would
become a favorite modernist technique for reconciling formal experiment with an awareness
of literary tradition.
It might be pointed out here that Eliot was also a close friend of Ezra Pound, another
important writer of the modernist movement, who had suggested several changes to The
Waste Land prior to its publication. Dr.Rakesh suggests that Pound has a great influence on
this poem drawing the attention to the dictation of the poem in which Eliot calls Pound "the
better maker".

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Symbolism:
Eliot's The Waste Land can be observed as a window to modern literature in a sense that it
represents the ultimate application of the norms of one of the movements that appeared in
that century, which is the French Symbolist Movement as suggested by most critics including
Dr. Rakesh. In his book T.S. Eliot: An Evaluation of his Poetry, Ramji Lall argues that The
Waste Land is a symbolist poem saying:
Intimately related to this aspect of The Waste Land is its quality as a symbolist
poem, where there is much suggestion and implication, and many hints of
possible meanings, but where nothing stated with absolute finality.
Thus, it can be said that The Waste Land is a window to the style of symbolism developed by
the French Symbolist Movement. This symbolist style represents a great trend followed by
writers of modern literature.
Imagism:
Eliot's The Waste Land can be observed as a window to the twentieth century literature in a
sense that it represents the ultimate application of the norms of on of the movements that
appeared in the century. There is a movement led by Ezra Pound which is known as
IMAGISM. This movement emphasizes the use of images in literary works. It is clear that
The Waste Land is full of images; not only this but also it is wholly based on images. The
poem is full of images and allusions, which has been a trend in the twentieth century not only
by Eliot and Pound but also by so many others like Yeats and Joyce. In brief, it can be said
that the poem represent the common trend in the twentieth century in terms of images and
allusions.

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From the Point of View of Similarity with other Works in the Twentieth Century:
There are a lot of works that are similar to The Waste Land in terms of themes, style, trends,
etc. these similarities lie on the general atmosphere of the age as well as in some individual
significant works in the same age. There could be aggregate agreement that understanding
The Waste Land counts for understanding the general spirit of the age.
The student, conducting this research, wrote the following extract intending to send it to a
professor of literature a year ago in favour of this argument. The argument is presented with
some modification, it is as follows:
The Waste Land is the land supposed by Eliot to hold within it the modern world
in which citizens have the identity of The Unknown Citizen as indicated by the
Auden. It is world that is destroyed in terms of the matter and spirit, so that The
Second Coming might be the solution other wise escaping is better and Sailing to
Byzantium is the solution suggested by Yeats. The Waste Land is the land of the
dead where the van intended for transportations is mainly the Ambulance
according to Larkin. This land is full of fragmentation in material and spirit,
which is the reason of the act of Mending Wall for Robert Frost as it might be his
reason also for his intention to go through a new road which is the Road Not
Taken. In such land people are distracted even more than Hamlet; The love Song
of Alfred J. Prufrock is free from any sign of love, and the title character lives in a
world full of unclear views. Not only Prufrock but also the other people, for a
person who kills a man for no real reason other than the excuse of war, such act is
counted wrong except in The Waste Land; The Man he Killed is a sign of the fact
that people lose the significance of their lives. This general atmosphere of the
twentieth century literature indicates pessimism which is all represented in Eliot's
The Waste Land.
Not only in terms of unification the various themes and subjects of the age does The Waste
Land represent the twentieth century literature, but also in terms of the other aspects of
literature like views, trends, scenes, and so on. This can be illustrated by drawing similarities

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between any literary work written by any writer and Eliot's The Waste Land. This issue is
discussed in a whole section in this paper.
From the Point of View of Representing other Literary Works:
From this point of view, it might be argued that The Waste Land does not represent only the
twentieth century literature but also different eras of English literature. However this context
is an attempt to tackle these aspects of twentieth century literature only. This point is intended
to be discussed in a later section in terms of the views held by Eliot and also by other modern
writers.
The above paragraphs describe the seeds and the beginning of the growth of this idea,
'The Waste Land as a window to modern literature'. They have been discussed in this part of
the study separately because of the fact that they participate, both directly and indirectly, in
the main idea of the study, however, they have been discussed before. Some of these points
were developed in this study and some others were left without further exploration because of
the fact that they had been discussed and studied extensively by others. Thus, this part shows
the previous works by critics and also ideas by the student conducting this study.

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Critics' Views on the Poem Observing it as a Representation of
'MODERNISM'
This article starts with illustrating how critics observe the poem as a representation of
MODERNISM. This view is held by many critics; however, no-one of them has stated that the
modern literature can be observed through this poem. The views are mainly focused on the
style of the poem, and a less focus is given to the thematic aspects of the poem. It should be
observed in this context that some of these views will be discussed in details more than other
views depending of the fact of how much the view attributes to the matter of this discussion.
Worthy mentioned that there are other views; the views collected here are only example but
not every thing written about The Waste Land.
It is well-known that The Waste Land holds the unique distinction because in 1922 it
changed the state of poetry. Although The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock had created some
ripples before it, The Waste Land utterly transformed the conventional poetry as it was
known previously and established 'Modern Poetry'; in particular it fixed the styles known as
‘modernist’ verse. Another great figure in this new movement was the poet Ezra Pound who
published Eliot’s first poem and gave him much editorial advice on The Waste Land. The
following paragraphs illustrate how the critics consider The Waste Land as a representation of
the modern literature.
Many critics observe modernity through The Waste Land. In his A Genealogy of
Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, Levenson H. Michael states the following:
Modernism has been defined as a rejection of traditional 19th-century norms,
whereby artists, architects, poets and thinkers either altered or abandoned
earlier conventions in an attempt to re-envision a society in flux. In literature
this included a progression from objectivist optimism to cynical relativism
expressed through fragmented free verse containing complex, and often
contradictory, allusions, multiple points of view and other poetic devices that

Ashmory 2010 17
broke from the forms in Victorian and Romantic writing, as can be seen in
T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".
He also suggests that modern philosophy can be perceived in The Waste Land. In this
context, he says:
The varied perspectives or lack of a central, continuous speaker uproots "The
Waste Land" from previous forms of poetry; however, it is not simply for the
sake of being avant-garde, but to espouse the modernist philosophy, which
posits the absence of an Absolute and requires the interpretation of juxtaposed,
irreconcilable points of view in order to find meaning. The first stanza
illustrates this point. Within the first seven lines, the reader is presented with a
"normal" poem that conforms to an ordered rhyme and meter. Suddenly, the
German words "Starnbergersee" and "Hofgarten" are introduced, readjusting
the reader's own view of the poem, before throwing it completely off-course in
line 12: "Bin gar keine...." Just as quickly, though, the lines revert to a
previous pattern with the use of "And I...", "And down...", "And when...."
"Discontinuity, in other words, is no more firmly established than continuity,"
Regarding the use of fragments in this poem, Michael Levenson observes this technique as a
modern one. He states:
Eliot also employs fragments in the work, further articulating his modernist
ideas. These fragments are sometimes used to blur the lines between speakers,
but also serve to blend opposing strands of knowledge. Trying to singularly
categorize the usage of fragments is as difficult as finding a unified meaning
in the poem and that is the entire point. Yet, in keeping with modernist
thought, can there exist an "entire point"? The answer is inevitably
fragmented. In lines 307-311, "To Carthage then I came/ Burning burning
burning burning/ O Lord Thou pluckest me out/ O Lord Thou pluckest/
burning", the words of St. Augustine from his Confessions and the Buddha's
Fire Sermon are crammed together to form a new, incongruous whole. This

Ashmory 2010 18
synthesis hints at some sort of "truth" that may be discovered by joining these
ancient bits of wisdom, two differing perspectives. However, if one assumes
that something meaningful can be created from "These fragments I have
shored against my ruins" in line 430, then an ultimate, final truth will never be
reached since there will always be more fragments to append and assimilate.
Note that this idea is derived from the content of the text in addition to the
actual fragmented form it utilizes. What separates this, then, from Classical
Hegelian philosophy (thesis, antithesis, synthesis)? Again, the "answer" is in
fragments. Hegelian philosophy is objective and acts as an end-all, be-all
answer to the workings of the universe. However, in keeping with its own
ideas, there must be an antithesis to this mode of thought, which came forth in
the Romantic and, later, modernist works. In this way, one is presented with
the subjective core of modernism that truth will always be relative to the
perspective from which it originates, be it Eastern religion, Catholicism, or
any combination, the result is still a subjective fragment.
He concludes suggesting the view held in this paper that The Waste Land can be observed as
a representation of the modern literature. In this context, he says:
The human experience is fragmented and defies logic, and in order to fully
convey this, modernist poets such as Eliot had to bend and break conventions,
and their own expressions may culminate in something which is not fully
expressible within modern society, though modern society was used as an
indirect means of getting at this "Inexpressible." A better way of putting it
could be that Eliot's The Waste Land was a direct way of getting at something
indirect from the modern world, for it required a reinvention of poetics and the
very use and meaning of language. Since the modern period is said to extend
to this day (it's debated whether it's post-modern or not, since both elements
survive), any final say on the matter is difficult. What can be said is that Eliot's
poetry, as misinterpreted, misread, and misunderstood as it may be, is a
quintessential cornerstone in modernist thought, a fragment in the puzzle,
which may yield an emergent whole, though it may not be fully grasped.

Ashmory 2010 19
Less supportive in the views on the poem, Jean-Michel Rabaté perceives the poem as
a masterpiece of modern age. Rabaté states in this context:
The peculiar "obstetrics" to which the manuscript of the poem was subjected
has often been discussed. It is generally agreed that Pound’s cuts transformed
a chaotic mass of poetry into a precise, aggressively modern masterpiece.
Perhaps the view above is in favour of the argument of this article, but Pericles Lewis in his
Cambridge Introduction to Modernism has been more supportive for this view. He says that
“Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment,
since 1900”. Having stated this idea, he elaborates as follows:
The Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist
poetics, both for its broad symbolic significance and for Eliot’s masterful use
of formal techniques that earlier modernists had only begun to attempt. The
critic I. A. Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-
war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of
aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water
which seems suddenly to have failed.” Eliot later complained that “approving
critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a
generation,’ which is nonsense.
He considers the use of allusion in the poem as a sign of modernity; he states:
The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a
variety of verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of
speaking for an entire culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential
statement of that crisis and the epitome of a modernist poem.
Lewis discusses Eliot's style in terms of Eliot's modernity. He says:
Like many modernists, Eliot was highly self-conscious about his relationship
to literary tradition. In a well-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” (1919), Eliot described how the modern poet, when truly original,
enters into a dialogue with tradition. He claimed that a great poem makes it
necessary to understand all earlier poetry of the same tradition in a new light.

Ashmory 2010 20
Lewis argues that despite the fact that Eliot is inspired in this poem, the poem, still, is able to
stand by itself as a window for modern poetry using phrases like "rebirth" to indicate this
meaning. In this context he highly observes:
Even if he could become inspired, however, the poet would have no original
materials to work with. His imagination consists only of “a heap of broken
images,” in the words of line 22, the images he inherits from literary ancestors
going back to the Bible. The modernist comes to write poetry after a great
tradition of poetry has been all but tapped out. Despite this bleakness,
however, the poem does present a rebirth of sorts, and the rebirth, while
signifying the recovery of European society after the war, also symbolizes the
renewal of poetic tradition in modernism, accomplished in part by the mixing
of high and low culture and the improvisational quality of the poem as a
whole.
He adds:
The Bible, Shakespeare, and Dante obviously provide historical and aesthetic
ballast for Eliot’s apparently chaotic modern poem, but other types of allusion
seem more bizarre. Many of the quotations appear in foreign languages, such
as the lines from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1857-59), a legendary story of
adultery which helps Eliot to establish the theme of frustrated or misdirected
sexuality. While occasionally quoting his favorite modern French poets,
including Baudelaire, he also includes passages of everyday conversation,
such as the snippets in lines 8 to 16 from the reminiscences of Countess Marie
Larisch, the niece of the former Empress of Austria and a fashionable
contemporary of Eliot.
Lewis discusses Eliot's use of allusion drawing the attention to other writers like Pound and
Joyce. He says:
Eliot’s allusive method is a distinctive feature of his poetry, but he developed
it in part on the model of some of Pound’s earlier poems, and Pound’s editing
of The Waste Land greatly increased its fragmentation. An even more
important influence was Joyce. Eliot read the early episodes of Ulysses that
appeared in the Little Review; as assistant editor at The Egoist, he read the

Ashmory 2010 21
original drafts of five episodes that were published there in 1919. He also read
other parts of the novel in manuscript and corresponded with Joyce about it.
He later confessed to having felt that Joyce’s Ulysses did “superbly” what
Eliot himself was “tentatively attempting to do, with the usual false starts and
despairs.” Allusion would become a favorite modernist technique for
reconciling formal experiment with an awareness of literary tradition.
Going through the poems influence on others and passing by the style used in the poem,
Lewis moves his argument to describe the poem as an Epic saying:
The Waste Land is also characteristic of modernist poetry in that it contains
both lyric and epic elements. Modernism continued the tendency, begun in
romanticism, to prize lyric highly, but many modernist poets also sought to
write in the traditionally highest form, epic. Eliot defined the lyric as “the
voice of the poet talking to himself, or to nobody,” and if we accept his
description of The Waste Land as a “piece of rhythmical grumbling,” it may
seem to belong to the lyric tradition.
On the fact that Eliot was influenced by Pound, Lewis says:
Instead of granting perspective on history, they struggle to contain it in their
irregular forms. In the first draft of his own fragmentary epic, The Cantos, in
1917, Pound had written that “the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to
stuff all its thoughts in.” The modernist epic would have to be a rag-bag.
The last thing to be taken from Lewis is his view on the position of Eliot's among other
modern writers, in which he says:
Like other modernist models of history—Yeats’s gyres, Pound’s vortex,
Joyce’s Vichian cycles—Eliot emphasize the current moment as one of crisis,
either preparing for or recovering from a radical break in history. This radical
break certainly has something to do with the first world war, but it is also an
aspect of the modernists’ eschatological view of the world, that is their
fascination with the problem of destiny and the last judgment. It is for this
reason that Kurtz’s famous last words (“The horror! The horror!”) in Heart of
Darkness ring through so much of later modernism. Eliot originally intended

Ashmory 2010 22
to use them as the epigraph for The Waste Land. As Conrad’s narrator,
Marlow, says, “he had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a
remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it
had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it
had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire
and hate.” The capacity to judge a civilization that teeters on the edge of chaos
was highly prized by Eliot, as it was by Pound, Whose Cantos shares some of
the features of The Waste Land, and by the other modernists who attempted
their own epics.
On the success of The Waste Land and the fact that it represents a model poem for the
age, V. A. Sahnne says in his editing for the The Waste Land:
About eighty years have passed since T.S.Eliot published The Waste Land in
The Criterion (London, October 1922) and in The Dial (New York, November
1922) and during this period the poem not only has become successful in
establishing itself as a classic of the modern period, but also has become ‘a
major critical industry in recent years’.
M.H. Abrahams in his A glossary of Literary Terms suggests that among the various aspects
of a modern poem, only two important ones namely its form and its theme are always
considered as the deciding factor while evaluating to the poem. It is because the so well
known vague term ‘modernism’ can be applied to the piece of work which involves 'a
deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases' as far as its very structure and
forms are concerned, and secondly if the work questions 'the certainties that had supported
traditional modes of social organization, religion and morality and also traditional modes
concerning the human self '.
Many questions are asked about this poem. At the first reading for The Waste Land, the first
question to rise is: 'Is the poem a unified whole or is it a group of separate poems?' according

Ashmory 2010 23
to Jain whose views on the poem are to be discussed later. This question is answered by
Cleanth Brooks in his Modern Poetry and Tradition. Pinto in his Crisis in Poetry: 1880-1940
argues in favour of the importance of Eliot’s remark that Tiresias 'personage in the poem
because of the fact that it unites all the rest resulted in 'little or no attempt to deal with it [The
Waste Land ] as a unified whole as suggested by Brooks too.
A modern poem should be impersonal. In T.S.Eliot:The Selected Poems Manju Jain
supports the view that The Waste Land is impersonal suggesting that this technique,
technically termed as 'Montage', is accompanied by presentation of 'view –point' in the poem,
because Eliot was sure that 'one cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more
impersonal point of view or splitting it up into various personalities' (Jain 1996). And this
also contributed to fragmentation of the poem.
Pinto suggests that The Waste Land is a scene of modern literature saying:
The First World War in its later phases opened the eyes of the poets like
Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, who suddenly saw the modern world in all its
naked horrors unmasked by the impact of the war, and were shocked into the
creation of vital poetry
However 'Eliot was not', as Prof. P .K. Mohanty puts it in his Seminar Lecture titled ‘Eliot’s
The Waste Land’, 'bothered about physicality of war nor even bothered about economical
impacts of war'. He argues that Eliot thought that
…it was necessary to find expression for a new sort of sensibility arising out
of conditions that were wholly different from those of agricultural, class
dominated society from which the old traditions of English poetry had sprung
The Waste Land has been called by Pound as 'the justification of the “movement” of our
modern experiment since 1900' which is what is suggested by Malcolm Bradbury in his The

Ashmory 2010 24
Modern World Ten great Writers. Bradbury also suggests that The Waste Land is the poem
without which 'modern poetry could not have been the same'.
John Xiros Cooper suggests that the poem does not merely reflect the breakdown of a
historical and social order, but something more than that. In this context, he says:
The Waste Land does not merely reflect the breakdown of an historical, social,
and cultural order battered by violent forces operating under the name of
modernity. For Eliot the disaster that characterized modernity was not an
overturning, but the unavoidable, and ironic, culmination of that very order so
lovingly celebrated in Victoria's last decade on the throne.
On the other hand, The Waste land is said to have influence on modern criticism
itself. The Waste Land is usually considered as an example of a modernist text. T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land is a foundational text of modernism, representing the moment at which
imagism moves into modernism proper. Broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices
of imagery come together to form a disjunctive anti-narrative. The motif of sight and vision is
as central to the poem as it is to modernism; the omni-present character Tiresias acting as a
unifying theme. The reader is thrown into confusion, unable to see anything but a heap of
broken images. The narrator, however (in "The Waste Land" as in other texts), promises to
show the reader a different meaning; that is, how to make meaning from dislocation and
fragmentation. This construction of an exclusive meaning is essential to modernism.
The Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist poetics, both for
its broad symbolic significance and for Eliot’s masterful use of formal techniques that earlier
modernists had only begun to attempt. The critic I. A. Richards influentially praised Eliot for
describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the

Ashmory 2010 25
groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water
which seems suddenly to have failed.” Eliot later complained that “approving critics” like
Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I
may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form
part of my intention.” Nonetheless, it was as a representative of a postwar generation that
Eliot became famous. To compare Eliot’s comments on the poem with the way it was
received illustrates strikingly the fact that, as William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put
it, “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at
birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem
belongs to the public.” The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several
languages), a variety of verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of
speaking for an entire culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential statement of
that crisis and the epitome of a modernist poem.
Edmund Wilson articulated the accepted consensus that within a matter of 10 years, “Eliot
has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in
English.” His critical theory has been acclaimed in similar superlative fashion, especially his
influence on ‘New Criticism.’
Pericles Lewis argues that comments on the poem with the way it was received illustrates
strikingly the fact that, as William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put it, “The poem is
not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes
about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the
public.” The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of
verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire
culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential statement of that crisis and the
epitome of a modernist poem.
He also suggests that:

Ashmory 2010 26
Like many modernists, Eliot was highly self-conscious about his relationship
to literary tradition. In a well-known essay, Tradition and the Individual
Talent (1919), Eliot described how the modern poet, when truly original,
enters into a dialogue with tradition. He claimed that a great poem makes it
necessary to understand all earlier poetry of the same tradition in a new light.
Eliot brought it all together in The Waste Land. In one poem the crisis-ridden state of the
modern European world with wars, rumours of wars, the rise of fascism, the dominance of
imperialism and the effect they had on the state of mankind were reflected. More than that,
in addition to these as subject, the poet reinforced them with style. The modernist poetry
forsook the kind of ‘poetic’ language of the 19th century bringing into the verse quite a bit of
plain talk in ordinary language. Expressions, turns of phrase, the way the lines of the poem
were organised, an appearance that would have seemed prosaic as well as other modes of
expression that broke long-held conventions were commonplace in the new poem. Many of
these upset the complacency of the society in 1922. However, it did not take long for the
critics and the audience to realize that poetry had changed and that this great poem had in fact
set new standards.
Those were the reasons for the unprecedented impact of the poem and the great influence it
had over the art that followed.

Ashmory 2010 27
The Waste Land as a Window through Views and Themes
This part of the study deals with the view that The Waste Land is a window for the
twentieth-century literature in terms of similarities and comparable aspects between The
Waste Land and any other modern work of literature. There are views held by Eliot which are
held, also, by other writers. On the other hand, there are themes that are discussed by Eliot in
this poem and found in other modern literary works. Such common areas of similarities and
views contribute to The Waste Land being a window for modern literature.
There are different views held by Eliot, which are illustrated in this poem. Some of
these views are his being against war, against illegal relationships, seeing the world in a
chaotic state, seeing religion as the solution, feeling absence of the meaning of life, feeling
dissatisfaction towards the society, etc. It is clear that these views are mainly of the modern
age, and the adoption of this view can be observed in the works of some other modern
writers.
Eliot holds a view against war in The Waste Land and his view represented in the idea that all
the wars are one and their results have been only one which is a great loss in the lives of
human beings. His view against war is observed in so many different literary works like
George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and
Earnest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. This view is against the view held by the writers in
the previous century, in which the war is glorified.
Eliot holds a view against illegal relationships in the poem and his view is represented in the
idea that such relationships cause social problems. His view against illegal relationships is
also held by W.B. Yeats in his poem Sailing to Byzantium in which he objects on such acts
made by the young.

Ashmory 2010 28
Eliot holds a view of seeing the world in a chaotic state in which people feel disturbed and
lost that "What shall we ever do?" is a repeated question which have no answer. The same
view is held by Samuel Beckett in his play Waiting for Godot in the characters cannot hold an
idea nor remember anything happened to them. It might be mentioned here that in this play
the characters ask one another about what to do, but satisfying answer is not found.
Eliot holds a view of seeing religion as the solution for this disturbed and unbalanced life. He
suggests that under the "Red Rock" people might find the solution of their problem. This
view is held also by W.B. Yeats in a large number of his poems and specially The Second
Coming. Such view is held because of the chaotic state of the world in which "the center
cannot hold".
Eliot holds a view of feeling absence of the meaning of life, because of which people live and
die without any purpose and also act, fight, kill or do anything for no clear reason. The same
view is held by Thomas Hardy in his poem The Man he Killed, in which he wonders why a
person should kill another one for the reasons of war. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is
also holding the same view, which is illustrated in the act of one of the characters attempting
to commit suicide. Such absence of meaning of life causes life to lose its significance and that
leads to people thinking of nothingness of their lives and as a consequence they do not
perceive the value of life at all.
Eliot holds a view of feeling dissatisfaction towards the society; he sees that the society has
lost its main concepts and the central values of it. This dissatisfaction is held by different
writers like George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden and John Steinbeck. George
Bernard Shaw holds this view of dissatisfaction towards the society and his great play Arms
and the Man illustrates this view, and his play Man and Superman illustrates this view too.
W.B. Yeats holds the same one view in his poem The Second Coming and the poem Sailing
to Byzantium. W.H. Auden holds this view in his poem The Unknown Citizen. John Steinbeck
supports this view suggesting that the world has lost its merits as illustrated in his The Pearl.

Ashmory 2010 29
It can be observed that this variety of views held by Eliot is held by other writers in the
modern time. Some of these views are held by people before the publication of The Waste
Land and some others after it, and this indicates that The Waste Land is a window for the
modern literature as a whole not only the literature the precedes it. It is clear that these views
are mainly of the modern age, which is meant to include the literary works of those writers
from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the beginning of the third millennium.
It might be observed here that because of the fact that The Waste Land is
characterized by multiplicity of themes and ideas, it might be expected to find one of these
themes discussed in another literary work. This may be interpreted in a view that Eliot, when
writing the poem, was trying to represent the overall picture of that time. This view, however,
is not contrary to the view held in this paper.
There are some modernist themes and they are found in this work such as individuals are
permanently estranged, each bearing a unique identity, yet they are able to connect with each
other to create a kind of coherence, however temporary. Some critics say that those themes
are found only in the modern age and not in any other age, and since those themes are
observed in The Waste Land, it can be said that this is one of the reasons why The Waste
Land is seen as a window to the modern literature.
There are themes discussed in The Waste Land, which are found in other literary works.
These themes are found in terms of all, but in terms of individual themes in individual works
of literature. For instance, some works have a prominent theme, and that theme might be
found among the various themes of The Waste Land. Such presence of such themes in other
literary works counts for The Waste Land being a window to the modern literature.
Jain focuses on the theme of 'horror' in The Waste Land as one of the prominent themes. She
says that the theme is more complex than referring to the 'horror' which Eliot had once
decided to borrow from Conrad’s phrases "Horror! Horror!", in The Heart of Darkness, as

Ashmory 2010 30
'the quotation would have emphasized the theme of self scrutiny in the poem'. However, the
theme is still present and reflected in another work of literature, and understanding the
meaning of it in The Waste Land counts for having a better understanding of The Heart of
Darkness.
There were cultural influences involved in the creation of this work. Many writers were
greatly affected by the end of World War I, at that time the most devastating of wars, and the
emotional aftermath. Similar, again, to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," Eliot's The Waste Land
shows unfavorable opinion to the new industrialization that began to take place after the war,
as the Thames River now had factories built all around. It might be said in this context that
there are other literary works which hold this unfavourable opinion towards the new
industrialization. Eugene O'Neil's The Hairy Ape is an example of this view against
industrialization.
It might be observed here that there are similarities between T.S Eliot's The Waste Land and
James Joyce' Ulysses as argued by Dr. Rakesh on his Lectures on Eliot's Poetry, in which he
states that there are "striking similarities between the two" works. D. H Lawrence in his
Kangaroo suggests that:
It was in 1915 that the old world ended. In the winter of 1915-16, the spirit of
the old world collapsed, the city in someway perished from being the heart of
the world and became a vortex of passion, lusts, hopes and fears and horrors.
Thus, it can be observed that these two works show how the world is seen as a place full of
horror and where fear breeds.
Lewis argues that modern literature has acquired a considerable area of pessimism which has
adopted many forms and images and, in turn, was represented by other literary writers. He
suggests that all the modernist models have been simply presented by Eliot's representation of
the crisis in his The Waste Land. In this context, he says:

Ashmory 2010 31
like other modernist models of history—Yeats' gyres, Pound’s vortex, Joyce’s
Vichian cycles—Eliot emphasize the current moment as one of crisis, either
preparing for or recovering from a radical break in history. This radical break
certainly has something to do with the First World War, but it is also an aspect
of the modernists’ eschatological view of the world, that is their fascination
with the problem of destiny and the last judgment.
It is for this reason that Kurtz’s famous last words (“The horror! The horror!”) in Heart of
Darkness ring through so much of later modernism. Eliot originally intended to use them as
the epigraph for The Waste Land. As Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, says, “he had summed up—
he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of
some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its
whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and
hate.” The capacity to judge a civilization that teeters on the edge of chaos was highly prized
by Eliot, as it was by Pound, Whose Cantos shares some of the features of The Waste Land,
and by the other modernists who attempted their own epics.
However, the view held above is observed somehow differently by others. According to critic
Stephen Spender, Dante's "A Divine Comedy" is not the only literary influence in Eliot's
great poem. Spender also credits another author from the modernist era, Joseph Conrad, for
"Heart of Darkness." He says of the connection between the two:
Conrad's Heart of Darkness is of course one of the "influences" in The Waste
Land. It seems to me, though, much more than this. Conrad's story is of the
primitive world of cannibalism and dark magic penetrated by the materialist,
supposedly civilized world of exploitation and gain; and of the corruption of
the mind of a man of civilized consciousness by the knowledge of the evil of
the primitive (or the primitive which becomes evil through the unholy union
of European trade and Congolese barbarism).
Another matter to be discussed in this context is a group of human-spiritual-life-related
themes found in The Waste Land and, also, in some other literary works. One the poets in

Ashmory 2010 32
whose works these aspects are found is W B Yeats who had begun to reflect a sense of
directionlessness, lack of faith, loss of confidence and human frailty in Europe at the time,
which prompted Yeats to write “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” in his poem The
Second Coming as one of these poems.
The theme of human relationships in which values and faith are absent is one of the themes of
The Waste Land and, also, the theme of many modern literary works. Many literary writers
discussed this issue. An example of these writers is D.H. Lawrence where he sees the law of
humanity as the law of the 'flesh and blood' in his novel Sons and Lovers.
Another theme is the lack of real values of humanity. In The Waste Land people represented
in a manner that shows their lack of real humanity in terms of human feelings and values.
This might be found in any work of literature as a matter related to any individuals but never
all, in The Waste Land, however, it is found as the general atmosphere of the world; in terms
of all rather than individuals. John Steinbeck observes more or less the same situation of the
modern civilized world as he states in his The Pearl "the world is a colonized animal". Thus,
the world suffers from animalistic human beings who have lost their humanity as observed by
some modern literary writers.
The last to be mentioned of the similarities between The Waste Land and other modern works
of literature is a scene in which the characters reveal their feelings in the current world. The
acts of the characters is intended here to represent people's life in the modern time; people
think and feel in a specific way which is full of disillusion.
There is a dramatic dialogue in The Waste Land in which there are characters who feel the
presence of ghosts as can be deduced from the lines:
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.

Ashmory 2010 33
This scene of having fear from unknown voices is similar to another scene in a literary work
written in the same century. This work, like the some other works also, shows a ghost-related
idea. It is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in which the following dialogue takes place in
the second act:
ESTRAGON:
In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of
keeping silent.
VLADIMIR:
You're right, we're inexhaustible.
ESTRAGON:
It's so we won't think.
VLADIMIR:
We have that excuse.
ESTRAGON:
It's so we won't hear.
VLADIMIR:
We have our reasons.
ESTRAGON:
All the dead voices.
VLADIMIR:
They make a noise like wings.
ESTRAGON:
Like leaves.
VLADIMIR:
Like sand.
ESTRAGON:
Like leaves.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
They all speak at once.
ESTRAGON:
Each one to itself.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
Rather they whisper.
ESTRAGON:
They rustle.
VLADIMIR:
They murmur.
The quotation above, like the one taken from The Wasteland shows the situation of the
modern people who have fear from almost every thing; these people imagine some sounds
and feel fear from these unknown sounds. These two quotations show living examples of the
lives of people in the modern life. Such life is characterized by the presence of ghost of the

Ashmory 2010 34
unexpressed kind; which might be meant to be modernity itself and its companion,
industrialism.
The view above is supported by Jean-Michel Rabaté's The Ghosts of Modernity in which it is
argued that:
The real ghost generated by the coupling/uncoupling collaboration between
Pound and Eliot was in fact just a word: the term "modernism," which could
then be thrown as a sop to the academics of the entire world.
To conclude, the above quotation inspired the writer and formed a certain point of
view. As the ghost has been interpreted as "modernism", it might be said here that The Waste
Land, as whole, is "modernism" itself. Every writer tries to write about a point or more on
his/her age, while The Waste Land is a clear statement of this age; it is minimal image of the
whole age. The different views represented in the poem are the prominent views supported in
that age. The multiplicity of themes discussed in the poem is the set of the prominent themes
specific for the modern age. The representation of life observed in The Waste Land is
perceived by the prominent writers of modern age and reflected in their works. Thus, a
statement like 'The Waste Land is a window to the Modern Literature' has its significance,
and its validity is highly observed.

Ashmory 2010 35
Conclusion:
Throughout this paper, it can be observed that T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is
considered as a window to the modern literature, the literary works written in the modern
time starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. The poem can serve as a window to
the modern literature from different points of view and various aspects. Many critics have
observed the issue that The Waste Land is the model of modern poetry, while others consider
it to be the beginning of modern literature. Aspects of similarities support the view that The
Waste Land is considered as the most important representation of the modern literature. The
poem has been the result of different modern influences, which count for its being a form of
modern poetry. The main features of the poem are those of the modern literary works. Thus,
The Waste Land can be seen as a window for modern literature.
The issue of 'The Waste Land as a window to the modern literature' has been tackled from
different points of view in this paper. Critics have a great account of views on The Waste
Land which support the view that The Waste Land is the model literary work of modern
literature. Some accounts of views illustrate how the poem has influenced modern criticism.
The dominant views and themes in the modern literature are found in this poem and they
show how this poem is observed as a window of the modern literary works. Points of
similarities count as matters of illustration that proves The Waste Land as a poem serving as a
window for modern literature. Throughout the research different aspects from different point
of view are tackled to illustrate how The Waste Land can be observed as a window to the
modern literature.
As this work provides somehow good deal of views of critics, the views have in common one
concept which is the fact that The Waste Land is a model of modern literature in terms of
style and motif. The views of the critics show how the development of modern poetry has
taken place after the publication of this poem. The dominant pessimistic feelings of the age
are seen as the spirit of the age; these pessimistic feelings are observed heavily through the
poem. The critics agree, unanimously, that the poem is a distinguished poem in the modern
time and is standing as model of modern literature.

Ashmory 2010 36
There are common and dominant views which are agreed upon by the writers. Such agreed-
upon views are tackled in The Waste Land as in different major and famous works in the
modern time and literature. As The Waste Land discusses these dominant views of the age, it
might be observed that it, The Waste Land, shows a clear minimized picture of the spirit of
modern literature.
The Waste Land, as a poem characterized by multiplicity of themes, compromises the modern
themes that have the impression of the modern age. Such themes are observed in The Waste
Land and as comparisons are drawn between this poem and any other modern literary work
from the point of view of these themes, The Waste Land is shown as a minimized, but huge at
the same time, picture of modern literature. Similarities of themes and scenes have
significance as they serve as good illustration of the reason why The Waste Land is
considered as a window to the modern literature.
'The Waste Land as a window to modern literature' is a point of view that has its reasons and
support not only in this research paper but also among a great number of critics. Illustrations
for this point of view are drawn from different points of view, like: previous views of critics,
the style of the poem, the major modern features of the poem, the views held in the poem and
the different themes tackled in the poem. Some other aspects might be observed in any future
study on this regard. However, this study focuses on proving The Waste Land as a window to
the modern literature from the points of view mentioned above.

T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' as a Window to Modern Lit

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