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World War I and the Emergence of Modernism

Eliot first published The Waste Land in December of 1922, some four years after the end of World War I. The unprecedented brutality and scope of the war shook many people’s faith in the social, political, and economic institutions that had previously seemed to hold the world together. Indeed, Western civilization seemed to have been reduced to ruins. For Eliot, as for these other artists, one of the most urgent questions pertained to the matter of aesthetic form. That is, they asked themselves what new forms needed to be invented to represent the sheer brokenness of the world. Naturally, there were many different responses to this question, resulting in a wide range of different aesthetic movements such as Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and so on. Though each of these movements had their own unique ideological concerns, they all emphasized forms of representation that privileged an aesthetics of fragmentation. Taken together, scholars consider this loose collection of movements as belonging to a larger aesthetic and philosophical phenomenon known as Modernism. To this day, Eliot is considered among the key figures of literary Modernism, largely because of The Waste Land.

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