T.S.

Eliot

What is revolutionary in his poetry?

Eliot’s poetry could be defined revolutionary for several reasons. First of all he’s revolutionary in
the use of different language and registers of speech, from the highly rhetorical to the colloquial
language of ordinary Londoners. Then his poetry is also very complex, it’s not for everybody but
just for an elite: in fact Eliot followed the belief that poetry should mirror the complexity of the
modern civilisation, and so it should be difficult. His poem is a collection of fragments from
different people, expressed in different style, by different voices, about different place and time.
So there are no logical links or connection, but only free association of images and thoughts in
the narrator’s mind. All fragments are variation of the same theme: desolation, bareness, death,
emptiness and depression. Eliot sees his poetic mission as that of piecing together this broken
world and finding redemption by creating a new symbolic system. Before the XX century poets
tent to develop only important events, with Eliot it’s not like this anymore: any experience can
become subject of poetry and there are no more distinction between poetic and unpoetic. His
poetry is a web of references to different sources (6 languages, 35 writers are quoted): the poet
needs the voices of all the other writers of the past to express himself.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land was first published in 1922, it consists of five sections and it was rapidly acclaimed
as the beginning of a new type of poetry capable of expressing the post-war sense of depression,
futility and a collapse of values. The common theme which links the different parts of The Waste
Land is the decay and the fragmentation of western culture. The various cultural fragments which
the poet pieces together are selected from an incredibly wide range of sources ( The Bible, Divina
Commedia, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Odissea..)

 I. The Burial of the Dead.

The poem starts with April and springs, and it gives a negative representation of spring. It’s
very strange because spring is traditionally the natural regeneration, which reflects the
spiritual rebirth. Then it talks about winter with positive connotation (it’s quite unusual),
because it kept us warm, it’s the time of death and it helps us forget. Then it moves to the
summer and he remembered an experience he did in this season, maybe in a German place.
The person who is speaking/writing is Marie, and there’s an atmosphere of death and sterility.
The Waste Land alludes in fact to the opposition between the sterility of the modern world
and the fertility of the past, but this opposition is never simple. According to Eliot in the
modern world this images are broken and we cannot reach or experience their original
meaning anymore. He believes that, in the modern world, culture has been made banal and no
longer teaches us anything. Eliot uses his own cultural fragments to demonstrate this idea by
ironically inserting them into scenes of ordinary modern life. In this text there’s something that
come out again and again: the theme of desolation, bareness of the contemporary world and
the post-war civilisation.
 The Burial of the Dead (Unreal City)
The text is set in the city of London, on the London Bridge, which is the financial centre of
Britain: it’s nine o’clock and offices and banks are open. The protagonist are people who are
going to work: they look sad, depressed and they are represented in hell because they have
lost their spiritual side, they are finally spiritually dead. In his vision of a stream anonymous
city workers crossing London bridge on their way to the office Eliot fuses an image from
Dante’s Inferno with another from Baudelaire’s Parisian scenes. The meaning of the scene is
thus complicated by the two different historical periods: the late medieval world of Dante and
the modernity od Baudelaire. Looking at the crowd Eliot is alarmed by their indifference to
their own lives. For them the church bells no longer signify a call to prayer but only a call to
work. Time flows but human been are the same: Punic war is connected to the first world war,
there’s no change. In this passage there’s also the idea of death, that people don’t want to be
regenerated.

 What the thunder said.

This extract is taken from the last section of the Waste Land and the title comes from the holy
Hindu book Upanishad, where the Lord of creation speaks trough the thunder. The first stanza
alludes to Christ’s passion, agony and death while the second and the third stanzas partly refer
to Christ’s disciples’ journey to Emmaus.
This is how the civilization is presented after the first world war: it’s a complex poem because
it represents a complex world. At the beginning the poet wishes there were water and no rock,
but then he seems to accept the inevitable presence of the rock and wishes only that there
were water as well, however little. Water represents life, and so without water it wouldn’t be
life. Finally, in the third stanza, he says he would be happy if there were even only the sound of
water. Thus the initial wish becomes more and more despairing, until we rich a climax of
desolation.

 Tiresias
Tiresias, taken from Greek culture, is half man and half woman and he accompanied Ulysses in
the land of the death. He’s blind but he knows the truth and he can tell the future. This scene
wants to represent spiritual emptiness in the inhabitants of this land: human been behave like
machine, with no love but only indifference. In fact it seems that love has lost his meaning (sex
without love). Tiresias represent what is highly spiritual, the ancient culture. The poet uses an
elevated language to talk about something that isn’t elevated at all.