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Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate
the chaotic state of modern existence and to juxtapose literary
texts against one another. In Eliot’s view, humanity’s psyche had
been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British
Empire. Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly
ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and
Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual,
academic works, and key books in the literary tradition informs
every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references
to both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers
as he writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot
explains the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths.
He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility
of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded
figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The
Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which
a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing
the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland,
even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including
Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems
take their images almost exclusively from Christianity, such as the
echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men” and the retelling
of the story of the wise men in “Journey of the Magi” (
Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope with either reproductive or nonreproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game of Chess” represent an out-of-control sexuality. World War I not only eradicated an entire generation of young men in Europe but also ruined the land. Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two primary methods by which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus and carnage. In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker discusses the dead land, now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised hands, stiffened from rigor mortis. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speaker’s mind to become infertile: his head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts.
