The Waste Land

by Dennis Green

T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922, a few years after the horrors of World War One, the “Great War,” the “War to End All Wars” had left Europe and America in a state of shock. Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, takes its titled ironically from the prayer, “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”

The wasted battlefields of Alsace-Lorraine are never mentioned in the poem, but Eliot’s contemporaries would have felt it underlying every word. We witness here a tipping point of western civilization and culture, the end of Victorian innocence and the beginning of a modern cynicism which endures to this day.

Only the uneducated, the naïve, the untutored can be optimistic in these times, Eliot would argue. And yet he finds precedence in Greek and Roman mythology, religion and philosophy, in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, even in the Upanishads and Buddhist texts. “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata,” (Give, sympathize, control), he quotes the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which teaches Krishna how to rule his subjects.

He may also be alluding to his marriage and his neurotic, cheating first wife, who manipulated their marriage until he finally separated from her. She later went insane, was institutionalized and died without ever seeing him again.

In six pages of footnotes, almost as many pages as the poem itself, he has great fun with the reader, since at least half of those notes are in Latin, German, Italian, Greek or Hindi. Obscure lines are elucidated with even more obscure references. He is, in our contemporary vernacular, “goofing.” And he is tearing at the very fabric of religion, faith, belief and dogma — the last leftovers of Western Civ.

Yet he is not a nihilist, not at all. He is one of the first of a New Age of believers who find hope in more lasting and traditional sources rather than 19^th Century Victorian thought and Christian culture. In a search pre-dated by the Transcendentalists, he looks to Pagan traditions — Greek and Roman mythologies, Hindu and Buddhist texts — to find comfort in the eternal.

In later poems, The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, Eliot finds modern disbelief as wanting as the hymns of old. “We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” And in “Because I know that time is always time/And place is always and only place/And what is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place…” he finds a dry affirmation. A sort of post-Punk Gothic Deconstructionist joy. “Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something/Upon which to rejoice.”

In our own time, Eliot has been badly misunderstood. He anticipates a collapse of all that was held dear, writing in the 1920s, without knowing it would take another hundred years for that collapse to be completed. He would live until 1965, to see a re-flowering of interest in Buddhism and the Vedic truths, but he also saw in London, and on the news, scenes of a Soho and a Bleeker Street he would not have recognized. Mods and Rockers and all those Mockers!

Although I suspect he may have agreed with the young man carbuncular, and his plaint, “Can’t get no satisfaction!”

©2010 Dennis Green