The Waste Land: Historical and Literary Context

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 the First World War. The unprecedented brutality and scope of World War I 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.

The French Symbolist Movement

The French movement known as “Symbolism” developed around a group of poets from the late nineteenth century, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé. Contrary to their predecessors, these poets rejected the aesthetics of naturalism and realism. Instead of trying to represent reality in a direct way, the Symbolists wanted to illuminate profounder truths by way of the imagination. Through dreams, visions, and other modes of associative image-making, these poets sought, in Rimbaud’s words, to effect the “systematic derangement of the senses.” As Jean Moréas explained in his “Symbolist Manifesto,” first published in 1886, such a derangement of the senses paradoxically helps reveal the deeper meanings that lie behind the surface of things. In Symbolist literature, “representations of nature, human activities, and everyday phenomena” are in fact “veiled reflections of the senses pointing to archetypal meanings through their esoteric connections.” Eliot was an avid student of the French Symbolists, and The Waste Land bears the marks of his study. Through the “systematic derangement” of images, perceptions, and associations, Eliot produced a poem that reflects the intellectual and spiritual destabilization of his contemporary moment.

The Tradition of the Dramatic Monologue

Much like his early masterpiece, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land draws on the tradition of the dramatic monologue. Dramatic monologues are similar to the soliloquies that appear in plays, and according to the preeminent literary critic M. H. Abrams, three things characterize the form. First, dramatic monologues are spoken at a particular time and place by a specific individual who is not the poet. Second, they are specifically directed at a listener whose presence isn’t explicitly referenced but rather implied by the speaker’s words. Third, their primary focus is to reveal the speaker’s character. Although elements of the dramatic monologue have existed in literature at least since the time of the Greek poets, it wasn’t until the Victorian period that these elements coalesced into the form we know today. The Victorian most closely associated with the dramatic monologue is Robert Browning (1812–1889), who perfected the form across two volumes of verse: Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatis Personae (1864). Though Eliot was personally dismissive of Browning’s work, his own poetry owes much to this Victorian predecessor. With particular regard to The Waste Land, Eliot took the dramatic monologue to an extreme by collaging together a wide range of different speakers.