Fragmentation
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 tones within
one poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanity’s damaged
psyche and the modern world, with its barrage of sensory perceptions.
Critics read the following line from The Waste Land as
a statement of Eliot’s poetic project: “These fragments I have shored
against my ruins” (431). Practically every
line in The Waste Land echoes an academic work
or canonical literary text, and many lines also have long footnotes
written by Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and to
encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper into
his sources. These echoes and references are fragments themselves,
since Eliot includes only parts, rather than whole texts from the canon.
Using these fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes
and images in the literary tradition, as well as to place his ideas
about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of history.
Mythic and Religious Ritual
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” (1927).
Infertility
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.
