T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
Understanding the Basics – Allusion, Themes and Style
Sep 5, 2009 Rebecca Ann Anderson
The three keys to understanding T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” are allusion, voice, and fragmentation. Before focusing on meanings and poetic form, new students of the poem should start out by looking through the text from beginning to end in order to get a feel for the overall tone of the poem. First time readers should ignore footnotes, instead, familiarizing themselves with its structure.
Basic Structure
The poem is 434 lines long and begins with an epigraph, which is followed by five sections:
- The Burial of the Dead
- A Game of Chess
- The Fire Sermon
- Death by Water
- What the Thunder Said
Eliot also included 27 footnotes in the text, which he uses to explain his word choices, translate foreign language phrases, and discuss the poem’s meanings.
Voices
“The Waste Land” was originally entitled “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” This refers to a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend who read newspaper crime logs aloud in a dramatic style. This original title offers a key to unlocking the meaning of “The Waste Land.” The poem itself is a pastiche of literary and historical voices.
Fragmentation and Reassembly
T.S. Eliot wrote “The Waste Land” in 1922, in the aftermath of World War I. Both the structure and content of the poem are a response to the political climate in which he lived. Eliot uses fragmented images of historical narratives such as the quest for the Holy Grail, the Bible, Dante, and Shakespeare to mirror his society’s reliance on old traditions, customs, and aesthetic styles when creating the new Europe. Eliot’s fragmentation and reassembly of historical narratives creates a poem with new meaning out of something old.
Allusion
“The Waste Land” relies on both Western and Eastern philosophy and storytelling tradition. Although can appreciate the poem without picking out and understanding the individual sources from which Eliot picks his images and motifs, these allusions add an extra dimension of meaning to “The Waste Land.”
The following is a comprehensive list of the texts that Eliot quotes and references in “The Waste Land”:
- Charles Baudelaire, “The Seven Old Men,” from The Flowers of Evil
- The Bible: Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel, Genesis, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John, Luke, Matthew, Psalms, Romans
- The Book of Common Prayer
- Buddha, The Fire Sermon
- Francis Herbert Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay
- Frank M. Chapman, Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America
- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Dante, Inferno and Purgatorio
- John Day, Parliament of Bees
- Paul Deussen, Sechzig Upanishads des Veda
- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
- James Anthony Froude, Elizabeth, Volume I of The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth
- Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
- Herman Hesse, “The Brothers Karamazov or the Downfall of Europe,” from Glimpse into Chaos
- Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
- James Joyce, Ulysses
- Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
- Marie Larisch, My Past
- Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
- Thomas Middleton, A Game of Chess and Women Beware Women
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- Gérard de Nerval, “El Desdichado”
- Ovid, Metamorphoses
- "Pervigilium Veneris"
- Petronius, Satyricon
- Sappho, Fragment 14: “Hesperus, you bring back again”
- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, The Tempest, and Titus Andronicus
- Edmund Spenser, Prothalmion
- St. Augustine, Confessions
- Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem”
- Algernon Swinburne, “Itylus”
- Paul Verlaine, “Parsifal”
- Virgil, The Aeneid
- Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translation
- John Webster, The Devil’s Law Case
- John Webster, The White Devil
- Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance
- Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Themes
“The Waste Land” embodies other common themes the modernist literary tradition, including the disjointed nature of time, the role of culture versus nationality, and the desire to find universality in a period of political unrest.
The poem also has a number of reoccurring themes, most of which are pairs of binary oppositions. Some of the most common themes are, Sight/Blindness, Resurrection/Death, Water/ Drowning, Fertility/Impotency, Civilization/Decline, Love/Sex, and Voice/Silence.
While the structure, themes, and language choice in “The Waste Land” are not atypical for literature written in this time period, the poem is uniquely complex. With a careful and critical look, the poem provides the modern reader with both a glimpse of the collective psyche following World War I and an aesthetic experience exemplar of the modernist literary tradition.
T.S. Eliot
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