T S Eliot’s Waste Land

Montage approach in poetry:

Dr Senarath Tennakoon

...The business of the poet is not to find. New emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all...(T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919)

T.S.Eliot (1888-1965) published The Waste land in 1922.

While some critics attacked the poem as ‘waste paper’ ‘a toad’ and ‘a piece of tripe’, only a very few critics like Edmond Wilson and Conrad Aiken identified the positive aspects of Eliot’s poetry, appreciated the poem’s disjointed method and allusiveness, and comprehended the seriousness of the subject matter.

Some critics have focused their attention on the imagery and the mythic patterns in Eliot.

WB Yeats acknowledged Eliot as the most revolutionary man in poetry in his lifetime.

Yeats saw Eliot as a satirist who mocked the mechanical quality of urban life.

Eliot was influenced by the two main movements in European literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, namely realism and symbolism. While the former discouraged imagination, the latter encouraged it Literary texts of modernism too influenced him in composing The Waste Land Ulysses and The Waste Land are considered to be the central texts on modernism.

Eliot has used several resource materials. The Bible, Buddhism, ‘The Golden Bough’ by Sir James Frazer (1890-1915) and ‘From Ritual to Romance’ by Jessie L Weston (1920)

Eliot has imbibed imagery and information from several myths. For instance the myth related to the Grail (the cup used by Christ at the last supper) and the Lance.

Eliot was also influenced by the ideas of Wagner, Sigmond Freud, and Dante.

Several characters are mentioned in the text. These include Sybyl, Ezekiel, Tiresias, the Buddha and Madame Sosostris.

The reader needs to know some facts about these characters. For instace Madame Sosostris has been a fortune-teller said to be the wisest woman in Europe.

Symbolist writing was attractive to Eliot and the major French symbolic poets like Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), Paul Verlaine (1844-96), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), Jules Lafarge (1860-87) and stephanhe (1842-98) were masters of symbolism.

In 1908 Eliot read Arthur Symon’s (1865-1945) ‘the Symbolic Movement in Literature.’

Baudelaire and Lafarge exerted the strongest influence on Eliot (Macrae, 2001). Eliot was also influenced by Robert Browning (1812-89) in th use of dramatic monologue.

In 1914 he met the great American poet Ezra Pound and their friendship was lifelong. Both of them were responsible for the development of modernism that disregarded and overthrew artistic conventions. In the same year when The Waste Land was published, Ulysses by James Joyce too was published

It is extremely difficult to understand the meanings, focus, structure and the organization of this complex poem. There are five parts in the poem.

In part 1,’ The Burial of the Dead’, Eliot examines the solutions offered by some religions to the question of life and death. He says the death of Jesus Christ (the Good man) was for the wellbeing of the human beings in part 1 Eliot looks at urban life particularly the life of the Londoners. He finds that London is a grim place where the people are unable to see a way out of their deadness.

Part 11 is termed” The Game of Chess” where there are two interesting scenes or episodes.

In the first episode there is a rich anxious lady in a posh apartment who is emotionally unstable. Eliot reminds the reader of Cleopatra and Antony and Dido and Aeneas. He also reminds the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-low, king Teres who cut her tongue so as to keep it a secret. But the gods transformed her into a nightingale.

The second episode is set in a pub in London, where two women discuss the predicament in which Lil finds herself (Macrae, 2001. It is about the sordid life of Lil and Albert. Child bearing is looked upon as a distasteful situation which adversely affects the appearance and the health of the wife (Lil) and the husband (Albert) neglects the wife. He is unsympathetic and irresponsible towards her.

Eliot shows through these two episodes the sterile nature of human relationships between men and women Lil in the second episode looks old although she is thirty-one and her main interest is to avoid a further pregnancy.

Eliot makes a keen observation of the people leaving the pub and draws a parallel with that of Ophelia saying farewell as she goes to drown herself after the death of her father and suspicious of Hamlet’s love for her. Eliot also tries to compare the lives of Lil and Ophelia. Both lives are of deceit and incomprehension.

Eliot treats these human characters in the two episodes as pawns in a game of chess who are being controlled by their tawdry lives.

The Part 111 of the poem is titled as “The Fire Sermon” where Eliot goes deep into the unsatisfactory nature of life as explained by the Buddha and St Augustine. Eliot explores sexual dissatisfaction, He points out that man’s concern is focused on bodily appetites and self centeredness as shown by several incidents mentioned In this section the reader could perceive the integrity and vastness of the knowledge of Eliot in religion, folk lore, mythology, classics and modernity as valuable references and allusions are made in its composition.

The Fire Sermon of the Buddha in the fifth century declares that everything is burning with lust, anger and ignorance and human beings should follow the Noble Path for deliverance discarding suffering, misery, decay and death.

According to Christianity fire is a symbol of lust as well as a symbol of the purifying power of god. Eliot refers to Edmond spensor (1552-99) about the joyful aristocratic wedding on the River Thames in summer and observes that such an event is impossible during Eliot’s day as the river is polluted with the rubbish of the uncaring people.

He refers to james joyce’s Ulysses, where Bloom goes to attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral and Prince Ferdinend in Shakespeare’s tempest thinking over the death of his father and brother trying to fish in a winter evening.

In this section the reader is confronted with several references to works of other writers and poets. John Day (1574-1640s) “the Parliament of Bees” and to the Greek legend where Actaeon was punished by the beautiful goddess of chastity by turning him to a deer for his lack of self control.

He was later killed by his own hounds. Swooney is sexy and vulgar character. Mrs Porter is a character with a doubtful nature. Eliot refers to Paul Verlaine (1844-96) when he wrote a poem following wagner’s opera about Parsifel despite temptations cures the wounded king (the fisher King).

Parsifel’s feet were washed and the choir of boys in the chapel of the Holy Grail sing a song of celebration. The scene of feet washing derives. From the Bible where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples as an act of humility and purification. Eliot draws the sound “Twit.. Tereu” from a song by John Lyly (1554-1606) King Tereus raped Philomel who was transformed into a nightingale.

Twit is imitating bird song and Teres is referring to the rapist king. He episode involving tiresias is temporel. Tireases knew love from both sides (as he was a female for seven years, miraculously transformed into a woman for striking a pair of snakes copulating in a green forest and on the eighth year restored back to his original sex).

In Part iv (Death By Water) Eliot presents a putrefying dead body of a rich merchant who has drowned in the sea.

Apparently this merchant has not achieved anything in life. Eliot tries to draw parallels with the dead sailor in Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ and the final voyage of Odysseus. Both Dante and Tennyson saw Odysseus as a man with an insatiable curiosity and he never feared death. Odysseus was the opposite of the Buddha and St Augustine.

Part v is titled “What the Thunder said” where Eliot begins with a description of the death of Jesus and proceeds to describe a harrowing journey across the desert to an empty chapel.

The journey is grueling and marked with severe hardships. Finally the arrival of rain is announced by thunder. The voice of thunder offers three words of advice-”give’,”sympathize” and “control”.

In this section the journey through the waste land resembles the journey of the knight in search of the Grail. In the Bible, God is often described as speaking to man with a voice of thunder. At the death of Jesus the earth shook and there was a sudden darkness and there was a re-echoing of thunder.

The structure of the Waste Land is not easy to understand. It is not a narrative, or descriptive or dramatic or lyric or meditative poem. It is not an epic poem too. The structure is highly complex and superficially appears to be organized in a zigzag and haphazard manner.

According to Macrae (2001) Eliot has used the strategy of making films where scenes, events and episodes could be shifted according to the whims and fancies of the film producer or the director. This is the montage approach in making films. A similar organization or a framework is observed in the structure of this poem.

However the poem is distinctly organized into five parts, each part designated with a title. In each part the reader is addressed thus-the hypocrite in Part 1, the bystander a Ophelia’s mad scene in Part 11, The listener to the fire Sermon in Part 111, the voyager in Part 1v and finally once again the hypocrite in Part v.

Each part grows, develops and emphasizes his vision over human life. Eliot makes profuse use of allusion as he makes heavy use of several previously published literary and religious resources.

The allusiveness is rich and varied. Reference is made to the Bible, Buddhism, Spencer, and Wagner, Dante and Bauaudelaire and others. It is also profusely rich in imagery. The titles of the five parts of the poem themselves and the title of the poem “The Waste land” itself reveal Eliot’s sense of imagery.

The beginning of the poem reveals the sterility and dryness of the waste land with his sad remarks over the month of April and Lilacs. In Part 1 there is a desert landscape that reappears in Part v.

The style of Eliot using different verse forms and even using quotations from other literary forms have been appreciated by many critics. He mostly uses free verse followed by blank verse. But rhyming is not completely lacking.

He often uses the stress patterns in conversational English as for example” Hurry up please it’s time up”. Further there is variation in the tone of the poem in the different sections. Shifts in juxtapositions occur throughout the entire poem (Macrae, 2001).

The interpretation of the content in the Waste Land has been a puzzling experience. Since the poem appeared in 1922 there have been many contradictory reactions to it by the critics. Some said the it is an intellectual puzzle. Some said it is a joke against academic critics. Some saw it as the finest example of modernist art.

In 1922 Eliot declared that it was not the expression of the disillusion of a generation as some critics have expressed it to be.

Eliot, with his epoch-making “The Waste Land” which despite esoteric references that need annotation, conformed his position as England’s leading poet (Gaskell, 1998).

References.

1. Bloom Harold (1985) T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land, Chelsia House Publishers,

2. Gaskell Phillip (1998) Landmarks in English Literature, Edinburgh University Press.

3. Macrae.D.F(2001) York Notes on T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land, York Press, and London.