T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - Background and Intro

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is perhaps one of my favorite poems of all time. Certainly, it’s the most abstruse poem out of my array of favorites—it’s also the poem I analyzed extensively for my MA thesis several years ago. 

The Waste Land is widely considered to be one of the 20th century’s greatest and most profound poems, and rightly so. Over the next several months, we’ll be tackling The Waste Land through a five-part series of articles and videos. 

You can check out my video intro to the Waste Land here and read the full poem here. 

I first came across the Waste Land in the 7th grade when I was just 12 years old. That afternoon, my 7th grade English teacher introduced our class to Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” through the unorthodox method of having us all stand around outside for an hour on the frigid January morning so that we could become, in his words, literal snowmen. As we rushed back into the classroom to revel in the power of modern heat technology, my teacher began to lecture us about the poem’s bleak yet hopeful underpinnings and likened its conclusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land—both poems find recourse in the meditative aspect of Eastern philosophy. Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued, especially after my teacher left us with the thought that The Waste Land is probably one of the world’s most difficult poems to comprehend. Twelve-year-old Liza was up for the challenge. 

Of course, at twelve, slogging through the poem and missing 90% of its literary, philosophical and musical references, I came away from the poem more baffled than satisfied yet resolved to revisit the work as I grew older.  

By the age of eighteen, picking up the poem once again, I was absolutely hooked. 

The Waste Land is a poem about the futility of human desire. Published in 1922, the poem originally ran a whopping 19 pages long and would have likely retained its epic length had it not been edited by Eliot’s friend and fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound. Eliot later dedicated the poem to Pound, whom he called il miglior fabbro—“the better craftsman.” 

The Waste Land is divided into five sections, each of which mirrors an act of a Shakespearean drama. Eliot was a staunch proponent of tradition, arguing, in his famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, that one must first understand the history of the literary tradition before leaving a mark upon it. Eliot’s homage to Shakespeare is a nod towards literary dialogue and a key component to understanding the development of his poem. 

Throughout much of his work, Eliot aims to spark conversation with the figures of the literary past. In the notes to The Waste Land, for instance, he cites a book called from Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston as his primary inspiration. “Not only the title,” writes Eliot, “but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend.” We might presume that Eliot’s fascination for antiquity led him to select Arthurian romance as the backdrop for his poem.

As its title suggests, The Waste Land tackles the issue of societal decay through a reinterpretation of Arthurian legend. Just as James Joyce’s Ulysses is a loose retelling of Odysseus' homecoming in Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Eliot’s The Waste Land broadly follows the story of the Fisher King from the famous Perceval myth. In Perceval (the same myth that gives us the legend of the Holy Grail), we learn that the Fisher King once presided over a thriving kingdom, yet a wound on his leg has rendered him barren, leaving his kingdom to fester and decay. Though Arthurian myths—in the vein of the Greek epic tradition—may have been disseminated orally, artists throughout literary history have attempted to capture the story of the Fisher King in verse and prose alike: Chrétien de Troyes in his verse romance Perceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach in his chivalric romance Parzival, and Thomas Malory in his Arthurian behemoth Le Morte d'Arthur, to name a few. Yet Eliot’s Fisher King is perhaps best known as King Amfortas from Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, and indeed, it is no accident that Eliot, a great admirer of Wagner, quotes from several of his operas throughout the poem, borrowing motifs from the composer to bring his story to life. 

Understanding The Waste Land’s Wagnerian parallel is crucial to tapping into the poem’s deeper meaning: Wagner’s persistent commentary on the unnatural and even sickly nature of many human relationships strikes an important chord with the overall message of The Waste Land, and characters from Wagner’s operas and Eliot’s Waste Land alike evince a vehement urge to attain genuine connections in the face of desolation and despair. Eliot thus uses the Wagnerian trope of unattainable and unnatural desire to stress the perils to which modern society has subjected itself. But though Fisher King might stand for infertility, in Eliot’s retelling of the myth, he becomes a vehicle for bringing life back from the dead and imbuing meaning into an absurd and senseless world. Just like the Perceval myth, The Waste Land becomes a quest story—a story of recovery, fertility, and coherence. 

In looking to Wagner, Eliot offers a potential solution to societal decay through the revitalization and transformation of human relationships—a topic we’ll further explore in our next analysis of The Waste Land.

Stay tuned for my next installment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land analysis, where we’ll dive further into The Waste Land’s Wagnerian parallel, discussing human relationships in the first section of the poem—“The Burial of the Dead.”