39 pages • 1 hour read
The Waste Land
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
The literary achievement of Eliot’s ambitious work begins with the revolutionary poetry emerging in the late 19t century. A radical generation of young intellectuals found the cloying optimism, pleasant wisdom, and predictable rhyming and rhythmic structures of high Victorian/Edwardian poetry irrelevant and ironic within a complex emerging modern world of industrialization, rampant materialism, spiritual indifference, and broad economic inequities. Calling themselves modernists, these angry and uncompromising university-educated artistes sought to boldly break with any inherited assumptions about the form and function of poetry. Poetry was not a vehicle for sharing personal confessions or for pontificating about how to live moral lives. They perceived in art—literature, music, painting, sculpture—the last, best hope for Western civilization to right itself and to reclaim the grandeur and moral authenticity of its great past.
Modernists openly and vehemently disdained market appeal. Their works were thus highly experimental, daring, often purposely obscure, dense, and challenging as they viewed popularity and sales as hallmarks of shallow poetry. The movement embraced change and encouraged shocking readers into awareness. “Make It New” became its credo, as propounded by Ezra Pound—an American expatriate living in London instrumental in guiding the massive revisions of The Waste Land. Pound’s patient reworking of Eliot’s manuscript offers a master class in modernist poetics. Pound encouraged Eliot to cut more than half of the original draft and pushed Eliot to experiment with a variety of cadences and syncopations, to mix in the clack and chatter of colloquial language with the poem’s elevated and learned diction, to draw on the percussive possibilities of music, and even remove lines where Eliot indicated which characters were speaking to create a blurring of voice—a cacophony of contemporary civilization. What emerged then became the iconic exemplum of the modernist poetic movement: complex, dense, challenging, and revolutionary.
Historical Context
The Waste Land is a war poem, or more specifically a response-to-war poem, teeming with images and memories of devastation and a civilization in both literal and metaphorical ruins. No historic event more justified the modernist generational sense of anger and disillusionment than the pointless savagery of The Great War engulfing Europe, Russia, Britain, and the United States for eight grueling years, decimating its population, razing its cities into ruins, and collapsing economies for reasons that became increasingly murkier—a war that finally collapsed of its own irony in an armistice agreement merely amplifying the war’s lack of purpose.
Marketed initially to an idealistic and romantic generation as a chance for adventure and escape, WWI quickly spiraled into a grim slaughter. The war’s reality was made immediate because it was covered by journalists and recorded by photographers, which shocked Eliot’s generation. The conflicts introduced vicious new concepts for how to conduct a war including trench warfare, aerial bombing, poison gas, civilian casualties, and the machine gun; it also exposed critical limitations in field hospitals and medical care. For Eliot’s generation—weary of brutality that deployed new technology, which made killing efficient and impersonal—the war justified a profound sense of alienation and an inexplicable loss. Western civilization, which for the modernists had nurtured nearly a millennium of grand and inspiring architecture, art, music, and literature, had suddenly lapsed into a most uncivilized state. The war demanded new forms of expression to convey disillusionment and anxiety. The responses among the modernists ranged from the uneasy escape into self-medicating with alcohol or recreational drugs to bemusement and studied boredom; from angry polemics demanding a return to Western civilization’s roots to bold and radical experiments in discovering new forms; from sorrowful jeremiads for a world lost to vulgarity and violence to silly divertissements poking fun at art’s pretentiousness with anarchic freedom and giddy irreverence.
The Great War, then, was not so much the obituary for Western civilization as it was the liberation of modernism, sparking a tempered optimism and sustaining nearly a decade of new directions in poetry. The war’s moral bleakness and its widespread devastation compelled an unprecedented reaction of creative energy and innovation—the template for Eliot’s own defiant, audacious, and ambitious work.
Unlock all 39 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By T. S. Eliot
