Themes
The Damaged Psyche of Humanity
Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to
express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth
century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World
War I challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing
artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet
capable of changing the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted
to capture their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured,
alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an entire generation of young
men to the horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general
crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place
in a radically altered society. As for England, the aftershocks
of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution of the British
Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and
he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) demonstrates
this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular speaker wonders
whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or
if he has the fortitude to keep living. Humanity’s collectively
damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with one another,
an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including “A Game of
Chess” (the second part of The Waste Land) and
“The Hollow Men.”
The Power of Literary History
Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western
literary canon, and he packed his work full of allusions,
quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In “The
Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay first published in 1919,
Eliot praises the literary tradition and states that the best writers
are those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers
who came before, as if all of literature constituted a stream in
which each new writer must enter and swim. Only the very best new
work will subtly shift the stream’s current and thus improve the
literary tradition. Eliot also argued that the literary past must
be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard
against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most essential
bits of the past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers. The
Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of
literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern
life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation
of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination
of society and humanity.
The Changing Nature of Gender Roles
Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and sexuality
became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected those changes
in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the
nineteenth century, women were confined to the domestic sphere,
sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical
atmosphere dictated most social interactions. Queen Victoria’s death
in 1901 helped usher in a new era of excess
and forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910.
World War I, from 1914 to 1918,
further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly alienated
from one another and empowered to break social mores. English women
began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in 1918,
and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol
in public. Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could
afford it continued their education at those universities that began
accepting women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers
created gay and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and
femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug off rather
than as absolute identities dictated by society.
Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era
and expressed concern about the freedoms inherent in the modern
age. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reflects the feelings
of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from
World War I to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners.
Prufrock, unable to make a decision, watches women wander in
and out of a room, “talking of Michelangelo” (14),
and elsewhere admires their downy, bare arms. A disdain for unchecked
sexuality appears in both “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1918)
and The Waste Land. The latter portrays rape, prostitution,
a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive
sexuality. Nevertheless, the poem’s central character, Tiresias,
is a hermaphrodite—and his powers of prophesy and transformation are,
in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias,
Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by
the two genders coming together in one body.
Motifs
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.
Symbols
Water
In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death.
Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch
rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth,
and pass by fetid pools of standing water. Although water has the
regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can
also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor
from The Waste Land. Traditionally, water can imply
baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot
draws upon these traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides
solace, and water brings relief elsewhere in The Waste Land and
in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of Four Quartets.
Prufrock hears the seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along
the shore in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but, like Odysseus
in Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 800b.c.e.),
he realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices:
the poem concludes “we drown” (131). Eliot
thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for what
looks innocuous might turn out to be very dangerous.
The Fisher King
The Fisher King is the central character in The
Waste Land. While writing his long poem, Eliot drew on From Ritual
to Romance, a 1920 book about the
legend of the Holy Grail by Miss Jessie L. Weston, for many of his symbols
and images. Weston’s book examined the connections between ancient
fertility rites and Christianity, including following the evolution
of the Fisher King into early representations of Jesus Christ as
a fish. Traditionally, the impotence or death of the Fisher King
brought unhappiness and famine. Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic
of humanity, robbed of its sexual potency in the modern world and
connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence. But the Fisher
King also stands in for Christ and other religious figures associated
with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of “What the Thunder
Said” fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the
poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene
echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ performs one of his
miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the
Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish.
Music and Singing
Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the
divide between high and low culture, which he symbolized using music.
He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama,
was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The
Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture
by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs
from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices
nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow
Men,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, as the title,
implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem
ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by
drowning—a scene that echoes Odysseus’s interactions with the Sirens
in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another
way in which Eliot collages and references books from past literary
traditions. Elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of chorus, seconding
and echoing the action of the poem, much as the chorus functions
in Greek tragedies.
