Free Waste Land Essays: A New Understanding :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The burn out Land A New Understanding       The Waste Land, Eliots get-go long philosophical poem, can now be read entirely as it was written, as a poem of radical doubt and negation, spur that every human desire be stilled except the desire for self-surrender, for restraint, and for peace. Compared with the disposition expressed in afterward poems for the eyes and the birth, the coming and the Lady (in The dig up Men, the Ariel poems, and Ash-Wednesday), the hope held out in The Waste Land is a nix one. Following Hugh Kenners recommendation, we should lay to rest the persistent error of reading The Waste Land as a poem in which five motifs rule the incubus journey, the Chapel, the Quester, the Grail Legend, and the Fisher King. The motifs are indeed introduced, as Eliots overture note to his text informs us, but if (as this note says) the plan and a sizeable deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Westons h old on the Grail legend, the plan can only have been to question, and stock-still to propose a aliveness without hope for, a quest, or Chapel, or Grail in the modern waste land. The themes of interior prison and nightmare city--or the urban apocalypse elucidated by Kenner and Eleanor Cook--make much better sense when seen as furnishing the centripetal plan and symbolism, especi everyy when one follows Cooks discussion of the disintegration of all European cities after the First World War and the poems culminating vision of a new Carthaginian collapse, imagined from the vantage point of Indias holy men. A passing game canceled in the manuscript momentarily suggested that the ideal city, forever unrealizable on earth, might be found (as Plato thought) in another world, but the filename extension was purely sardonic. Nowhere in the poem can one puzzle convincing allusions to any existence in another world, much less(prenominal) to St. Augustines vision of interpenetration between the City of God and the City of humankind in this world. How, then, can one take seriously attempts to find in the poem any such quest for eternal life as the Grail legend would have to provide if it were a continuous motif--even a sardonic one? It seems that only since Eliots death is it possible to read his life forward--understanding The Waste Land as it was written, without being deflected by our knowledge of the writers later years.