Week Seven

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The First World War revealed the incalculable spiritual bankruptcy of western Europe and the pathology of its nineteenth-century ideologies. This fate of the “West” still weighs on the world. The Waste Land is an incomparable expression of the mind of Europe, its death instinct, and the prospect of a new beginning (drawing on the “East” and Christianity). In T. S. Eliot, we see how a “postmodern” sampling of the world’s and history’s cultural possibilities belongs to modernity itself. Before his early masterpiece, he was avant-garde; after, he became “reactionary and ultra-conservative.”

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Saint Louis in 1888, and died in London in 1965. His family had Boston Brahmin roots. At Harvard, he studied comparative literature and received an M.A. in English literature. He then studied at the Sorbonne, attending lectures by Bergson. He returned to Harvard in 1911 for doctoral work in philosophy. Babbitt, Santayana, Collingwood, Russell, and Royce were among his Harvard professors. Pursuing philosophy at Oxford, Eliot was in England soon after the outbreak of war in 1914. He met Ezra Pound, who would go on to promote Eliot’s poetic career. Pound was conspiring to keep Eliot in England, and Eliot was in fact dreading the life of an academic philosopher. In 1915, he was introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and they were married after having known each other only three months. The marriage was a disaster. While working at Lloyds Bank in London, specializing in the collection of German war debts, Eliot founded a literary magazine, The Criterion. His literary criticism had great effect; the modern English department was created under his influence. He converted to Anglo-Catholicism and became a naturalized citizen of Britain in 1927. In 1932, he separated from Vivienne—she was committed to a mental hospital by her brother in 1938. Eliot published the Four Quartets in 1943. Afterwards, he concentrated on writing plays, trying to revive verse drama. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948. He married Valerie Fletcher in 1957, which turned out to be a happy marriage.

Eliot wrote significant parts of The Waste Land while recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1921, first at Margate, Kent, and then in Lausanne, Switzerland. This, the supreme monument of poetic modernism, was published in 1922. (That year also saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the supreme monument of modernism in prose.) Pound helped cut half of Eliot’s original draft, which had the title He Do the Police in Different Voices. The Waste Land is something of a polyphonic dramatic monologue, and the claim made in one its footnotes should be taken seriously: “What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.”