Free Waste Land Essays: A New Understanding :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The crazy Land A New Understanding       The Waste Land, Eliots first long philosophical poem, can now be understand simply as it was written, as a poem of radical dubiousness and negation, urging that every human confide be stilled except the desire for self-surrender, for restraint, and for peace. Compared with the longing expressed in later poems for the eyes and the birth, the coming and the brothel keeper (in The Hollow Men, the Ariel poems, and Ash-Wednesday), the hope held out in The Waste Land is a negative hotshot. Following Hugh Kenners recommendation, we should lay to rest the persistent error of indicant The Waste Land as a poem in which quintette motifs predominate the nightmare journey, the Chapel, the Quester, the Grail Legend, and the Fisher King. The motifs are indeed introduced, as Eliots preliminary note to his text informs us, exclusively if (as this note says) the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by take to the woods Jessie L. Westons book on the Grail legend, the plan can only throw off been to question, and even to propose a deportment without hope for, a quest, or Chapel, or Grail in the modern waste land. The themes of interior prison house and nightmare city--or the urban apocalypse elucidated by Kenner and Eleanor Cook--make a lot better common sense when seen as furnishing the centripetal plan and symbolism, especially when one follows Cooks discussion of the mutiny of all European cities after the First World War and the poems culminating batch of a new Carthaginian collapse, imagined from the vantage point of Indias holy men. A passage canceled in the manuscript momentarily suggested that the ideal city, forever unrealizable on earth, might be found (as Plato thought) in another world, but the reference was purely sardonic. Nowhere in the poem can one follow convincing allusions to any existence in another world, much less to St. Augustines visio n of interpenetration between the city of God and the City of Man in this world. How, then, can one take seriously attempts to find in the poem any such quest for eternal life as the Grail legend would have to provide if it were a round-the-clock motif--even a sardonic one? It seems that only since Eliots death is it possible to order his life forward--understanding The Waste Land as it was written, without being deflected by our association of the writers later years.