The Nobel award victor of literature in 1948, Thomas Stearns Eliot captures the literary consciousness for more than one ground. As a modernist poet, Eliot flatly rejected the anthropocentric Romantic Lamentationss of the recent literary yesteryear. At the same clip, he besides transcended the angst-ridden, war-ravaged, chokingly fraught ambiance of modernism to seek for a significant significance amidst the fractured ruins of the experiential boredom pervading the 20th century.
This paper aims to understand Eliot ‘s meaning-making procedure by researching the assorted dimensions of The Waste Land, a 1922 creative activity. It tries to look into how Eliot deploys Classicism as a tool to help him in his enterprise. This paper, hence, magnifies The Waste Land though the lens of Classicism.
Classicism has been popularly defined as a inclination in art and literature that follows the ancient Greek and Roman rules. Though there have been minor goings from this designation of Classicism, as we shall see in instance of Eliot ‘s The Waste Land, the broader features of Classicism stand reverently adhered to. Classicism is by and large associated with harmoniousness, restraint and attachment to recognized criterions of signifier and workmanship. Classicist inclinations fructified really self-consciously from the Renaissance to the 18th century in the English literary civilization. They influenced clearly the authors of each age and acquired modified parlances in correspondence to the throbing beat of the fluid spatio-temporal world. Henceforth, how Shakespeare, Webster and Marlowe employed the classical heritage was clearly different from the manner in which Milton incorporated those elements.
Subjects and definitions of the perverse human status as punctuated in the classics translated into the Hagiographas of the writers prior to the Augustan age. Politically fraught 17th century witnessed revolutions, Restoration and many sociological formalisations of alteration. Literature in the signifier of booklets, journalistic Hagiographas and other experiments in prose began to carve a niche for themselves in the literary civilization.
Amidst this flux, the morning of the 18th century Neo-classicism endeavoured to achieve a telescopic position of the glorious yesteryear. Classics became a cursory theoretical account to rectify and rationally compose a sound order out of pandemonium.
Romanticism rebelled against this array of the weight of Classicism. ‘Imagination ‘ , feelings and emotions translated into literature as looks of “ self-generated flood of powerful feelings ” . So, while Shelley and Keats refer to the antiquity by making Prometheus and Hyperion, they simply used the past heritage as containers to mortalise the abstract ideas – without any fidelity to classical norms. Wordsworth, in fact, appropriated the usage of ‘rustic linguistic communication ‘ to joint better the ‘ideas ‘ about the universe at big.
Modernism dismantled this myth about the lingual ability of articulation of exact thoughts in words. The spread between the universe and the word grins so broad in the modernist texts that fragmentoriness and uncomplete exclaimings appear as actual looks of the experiential angst and boredom of the 20th century. It is within this model that this paper argues a instance for T.S. Eliot ‘s classicalism in The Waste Land.
What makes a piece of work classic is the tried relevancy of its claims to length of service. Dante, Homer and Ovid are authors who have stood the trial of clip across coevalss and centuries of alteration. Similarly, Shakespeare ‘s dramas and Milton ‘s Eden Lost have provided seeds of influence to authors wining them. The thoughts, looks and thought procedures of these craftsmen are so cosmopolitan and comprehensive that they have dominated the English literary imaginativeness boulder clay day of the month. Thus, anyone who wishes to make something ‘new ‘ would in fact stop up make overing on the already explored. Eliot ‘s essays like “ Tradition and the Individual Talent ” , “ Ulysses, order and Myth ” , “ The Function of Criticism ” and his unfavorable judgment elsewhere interrogate this inquiry rather repeatedly and self-consciously, possibly because Eliot was a poet and a playwright excessively.
Eliot declares that a poet can non inherit a tradition but merely get it through labor. The alone sense which would help in the consolidation of the kernels of the yesteryear is a cultivated mastermind of the author. The procedure of this “ advancement of an creative person is a continual ego forfeit, a continual extinction of personality. ” It is this complete respectful entry to the tradition that helps an “ impersonalized ” author as Pt to absorb the sulfur dioxide and O of past experiences to make a new poesy in sulphur trioxide. To utilize Eliot ‘s phrase once more, “ Relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted ” in the new. Eliot ‘s classicalism, hence, appears as the “ pastness ” of the yesteryear remoulded in the new parlances of the present.
In order to accomplish this amalgamate articulation of the yesteryear and the present, Eliot proposes the construct of “ nonsubjective correlate ” . The witting efforts to take concrete objects to associate abstract impressions engage Eliot ‘s originative trade in seeking for ‘objects ‘ in the classics. Henceforth, Phlebas, Tiresias, Gerontion, Prufrock and Sweeney despite being ‘new ‘ are basically reworked theoretical accounts of the yesteryear. This pertinent quotation mark from Eliot on Ezra Pound explains the thought compactly, “ When he deals with coevalss, he sometimes notes merely the accidental. It is simply a inquiry of agencies suited to a peculiar poet, and we are more concerned with the terminal instead than with the agencies. ” The coveted ‘end ‘ in Eliot ‘s poesy is to travel ‘beyond poesy ‘ as Beethoven tried to travel ‘beyond music ‘ . His fidelity to classicalism is an appropriation to accomplish that purpose.
Within an scope of this model, one can research The Waste Land from two vantage points – how does the verse form incorporate Classicism and how does it go from the earlier classicist efforts at one degree, and at the other how does The Waste Land transcend the weight of the modernist canon. In order to establish into these probes, this paper aims at concentrating chiefly on two countries – the subject and the construction of The Waste Land.
The Waste Land is a modernist expatiation on the ‘waste ‘ – ‘dead land ‘ , ‘dried tubers ‘ , ‘dead tree ‘ ( The Burial of the Dead ) ; ‘desert ‘ , ‘withered stumps of clip ‘ , ‘nothing ‘ ( A Game of Chess ) ; ‘brown land ‘ , ‘wrinkled female chests ‘ , ‘dusty trees ‘ , ( The Fire Sermon ) ; ‘a fortnight dead ‘ , ‘passed ‘ ( Death by Water ) ; ‘dry grass ‘ , ‘frosty silence ‘ , ’empty chapel ‘ ( What the Thunder Said ) – that punctuates modern consciousness. This waste is cultural taint, political purulence and literary languish that canopies the modern state of affairs. Eliot ‘s effort to comprehensively turn to this atmosphere gets authorised weightage in the procedure of deriving currency from the classics.
Eliot admits to Dante ‘s influence in his originative procedure. The snapshots of impressionistic images of decay and decrepitude in the text can be seen as symbolically inherited from the journey of snake pit in the Inferno. The manner in which he reworks the classical heritage going from the 18th century Neo-classicists basically, is an interesting intercession. The Augustans created mock heroic poems and mock heroics, more frequently than non, copying the classics. Besides, they mocked the modern-day universe of non being able to populate up to the classical ideal, on the one manus, while on the other, they at the same time repudiated those very ideals that could no longer be realized in the modern-day universe. Eliot, nevertheless, priviledges the ‘mythical method ‘ over the ‘narrative methodological analysis ‘ as James Joyce uses in the Ulysses. His purpose at the creative activity of Tiresias is towards internalising the classical case in points set up by Hamlet and others and doing connexions between these parallel personalities.
The yesteryear, for Eliot, becomes a reservoir from where one can ‘extract ‘ the ‘essentially populating ‘ . In his parodic analogues, nonsubjective correlates and raising up of imagist feelings – inverting the fecund Chaucerian April to ‘the cruelest month ‘ , raising the Shakespearean ‘burnished throne ‘ , Spensarian nymphs – Eliot appears to ‘submit ‘ himself to the past ‘self-consciously ‘ .
It is pertinent to observe here that Eliot announced that he was a “ Classicist in literature, Royalist in political relations and Anglo- Catholic in faith ” . Thus, Eliot ‘s embrace of the Classicist inclinations is clearly a political pick than mere aestheticism. The clear limit of the yesteryear and the present and efforts to seek for ‘pastness ‘ in the present is a carefully chosen Conservative political place. The Waste Land, henceforth, earmarks a hierarchy between the classical order and modern-day modern ruins. There is no Augustan aspiration to spread the clearly detached boundaries.
The respectful fidelity to classicist inclinations within the modernist canon appears concretized by the close attending he pays to the construction of The Waste Land. While Eliot eulogized Shakespeare for his comprehensive appraisal of thematic concerns in his plants, he puts Dante on a pedestal because of his preciseness of enunciation, clear, ocular images and economic system of words. Additionally, his congratulations for Donne and the metaphysicals was non a “ violent yoking together of heterogenous thoughts ” , as Johnson puts it, but a soft blending of the two looking anti-theses into a harmonious ‘whole ‘ .
Therefore, Eliot ‘s really careful enterprises to unite and intermix the ‘heaps of broken images ‘ has been commented upon by many critics as a symphonic music of musical notes or a solid architectural construction that his plants like The Waste Land has become. Eliot asserts in response that committedness to a ‘definite emotion ‘ is what produces the music and holds the assorted slabs of concrete together as an architectural ‘whole ‘ . The Waste Land can be read as an model embodiment of Eliot ‘s committedness to Classicism in the visible radiation of this statement.
Eliot adopts a manner and signifier that connects these ‘whispering emotions ‘ into a crafted whole. For illustration, merely as decay and waste run as leitmotiv in The Waste Land, a desire for regeneration pulsates in the throbbing sinews of the verse form. The ‘a small life ‘ in the ‘dull roots ‘ ( The Burial of the Dead ) ; ‘if it rainsaˆ¦we shall playaˆ¦ ‘ ( The Game of Chess ) ; ‘a new start ‘ , ‘burning ‘ ( The Fire Sermon ) ; ‘entering a vortex ‘ ( Death by Water ) ; ‘In a flash of lighteningaˆ¦bringing rain ‘ ( What the Thunder Said ) – all echo a ‘desire ‘ for ‘new life ‘ fuelled by ‘memory ‘ – some sort of regeneration. The uninterrupted committedness towards this desire of Resurrection can be seen as the consolidative rule that stitches the assorted images conjured in The Waste Land into a medley.
The Waste Land frustrates a reader ‘s aspiration to read the verse form as a additive narrative. The coherency and connexion achieved in the verse form surfaces towards the terminal when the assorted fragments fall into topographic point as the constituents of a jig-saw mystifier indistinguishable to the overpowering emotion achieved after looking at an impressionistic picture.
The fraught environment of the 20th century – depredations of the universe war, defeated aspirations, ennui, experiential angst produced a host of literary plants that unleashed the realisation of the broad spread between linguistic communication and ideas. The lingual disablement to joint precisely what one feels manifested itself by and large and universally as a complete dislocation of a whole into ‘fractured atoms ‘ . Inclinations like surrealism and Impressionism can be seen as particularised corollaries of the same within modernist literature.
When placed among the literary productions of the modernist canon, The Waste Land appears to owe its look to the predating Romantic bequest in poesy and Victorian esthesia in prose, particularly in the novels. Eliot perfectly despised the hypocritical optimism, sunniness, and hopefulness of Victorianism. In retrospect, he had already validated Dante ‘s Inferno over Paradiso and went so far as to asseverate that poesy does non hold to be found ‘through enduring ‘ but ‘in enduring ‘ – a slightly Keatsian submergence in hurting and agony. Possibly, that is why The Waste Land is literally imbued in the seedy, inexorable, blue, hopeless status of the modern being. This look of a heightened sense of boredom repudiates the popular charge of ‘heartlessness ‘ push on Modernism when contrasted against Romanticism.
However, The Waste Land does non indulge in drawn-out Lamentationss of the Romantics. It is a reticent, ordered indulgence in observing the experiential angst as a parallel portraiture of the mediaeval anxiousnesss of corruption. It is non allowing ‘loose ‘ of ‘spontaneous emotions ‘ , instead a graduated containment of a refined esthesia. Eliot pays near attending to non allow his ideas run amock in the wilderness of ‘imagination ‘ that produces ‘ideas ‘ – Romantic bequests. The Waste Land, despite its emotional sensitiveness to the modern universe, transcends the wild kingdom of ‘ideas ‘ to achieve a structural solidness. The kernel of this architectured design sublimates in Eliot ‘s dedication of the verse form to the craftsman, Ezra Pound, ‘il miglior fabbro ‘ .
The advanced transmogrification of the Chaucerian ‘April ‘ into the dried-out despondence of permeant fruitlessness in that ‘cruelest month ‘ , Shakespearean ‘burnished throne ‘ , fables of Philomel and Cupid, Pope ‘s agreement of the dressing tabular array and incorporation of the Vedic and Buddhist doctrine speak of a integrity in the verse form that surpasses even the premises of recognized precincts to specify Classicism.
While modernist poesy painted a comprehensive portrayal of the dried-out modern universe, it failed to offer a solution or a reparation to the ravaged status. The Waste Land seems to conjoin these two inclinations. The montage of disparate and at times helter-skelter images and the despairing despondence created in the construction of The Waste Land in the first four subdivisions appear to perpetrate themselves to an Aristotlean psychotherapeutic denouement in the last subdivision. The recurrent chant of ‘Datta ‘ , ‘Dayadhvan ‘ , ‘Damyata ‘ range a crescendo and echo Eliot ‘s modernist enterprise to happen a meaningful solution to the deceptive nihilism misread by many as permeated in the cloth of The Waste Land. To accomplish this undertaking, he parallels the hunt of redemption in his modern-day universe to the haunted kingdom of the mediaeval times. But the topographic point of salvation from this upset transcends European consciousness to happen consolation in the vale of the Himvanta – the pre-modern, pre-Christian antiquity to specify Classicism for Eliot.
With the last looks of “ Shantih, Shantih, Shantih ” , the poetic ideal suffuses the ambiance of the readers ‘ consciousness. The proclamation of peace after internalising the ideal of “ Give, Sacrifice, Control ” in The Waste Land is an accomplishment of Eliot ‘s witting consolidation of theoretical assessments in his essays and poetic experiments.
Eliot was an acclaimed playwright excessively. He one time remarked, “ The ideal medium for poesy, to my head, and the most direct agencies of societal ‘usefulness ‘ for poesy, is the theater. ” An highly cautious designer of assorted literary genres that he was, The Waste Land can be seen as an experimental merger of assorted literary strains in a ‘whole ‘ . While the verse form conjures up duologues as in “ The Game of Chess ” or the soliloquies as in “ The Burial of the Dead ” , it decidedly brings out the theatrical conventions to life. Besides, the apposition of legion voices, state of affairss and ambiances in great assortment attention deficit disorder to the dramatic component in the verse form.
The comprehensive manner in which the modern-day universe is portrayed in the lyrical music of The Waste Land has produced some critical sentiments around the verse form as an heroic poem creative activity. Though this expansive claim can be contested on assorted proficient evidences, the epical paradigms of the verse form surface in impressive proportions. If one considers ‘the barren ‘ of modern civilisation as the metaphorical hero and read the verse form in this visible radiation, one can negociate with the deep frozen range of the verse form.
T.S. Eliot ‘s The Waste Land qualifies the popularly conceived impressions around Modernism and Classicism. The poet, critic and playwright non merely paid bow to the literary traditions he inherited across coevalss and infinite, but well modified the assorted adoptions harmonizing to the changed and altering demands of his modern-day world. The verse form contests the standard canon, negotiates with each predating and present precincts of the literary motions and inclinations. The qualified amalgamate denouement of Eliot ‘s labored enterprise culminated into a new parlance that edified as The Waste Land. It is this regenerated ‘sprout ‘ and ‘bloom ‘ of poesy on the cadaver of ‘the waste land ‘ that makes this work a ‘Modernist Classic. ‘
