The World of Eliot’s Waste Land

In his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” T. S. Eliot predicated that rather than the narrative style of poetry popularized by poets of the Romantic era, poets of the twentieth-century would instead employ James Joyce’s “mythical method,” a technique characteristic of heavy mythological, historical, and literary allusions used to create a “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (177). Doing so allowed a poem to reach a new universal level of significance regardless of era, much like that of the mythic heroes of Greece and Medieval Europe. More importantly, Eliot noted that making use of the mythical method allowed art to be possible in the epistemologically unstable modern world. Indeed, with the development of modernism came dramatic shifts in the aesthetic paradigm for both visual and literary artists; similar to the new aesthetic schools of cubism, futurism, and surrealism inspired by redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers of the twentieth-century, Eliot argued that the mythical method provided poets with a technique to reconcile present ideas with older linear conceptions of narrative poetry. Specifically, according to Eliot, the poet gained a perspective that offered a new way of “controlling, of giving a shape and significance to the panorama of anarchy which is contemporary history” (178).
Many critics, such as Jay Martin, have argued that Eliot’s modernist poem “The Waste Land” correspondingly seeks to order the chaotic modern world; in particular with its substantial use of historical and literal references, the mythical method offers Eliot a satirical lens to perceive and give new meaning to the present (65). Critics have also argued, however, that the poem’s repeated allusions to fertility myth represent Eliot’s call for religious revival in Europe. Notably, D. C. Fowler contends that the poem’s ending represents “restoration” of the Fisher King’s waste land; to him, the Indian words given at the end of the poem provide the “abracadabra element . . . just as the hero of the Grail romances was expected to speak the proper words before the wounded king and his land could be restored, so [does] the protagonist in ‘The Waste Land’ provide an incantation” (36). The negativism of the opening lines is therefore supplanted by the poem’s closing line.
However, reading “What the Thunder Said” as Eliot’s resolution to the problems dramatized earlier in the poem disregards the irony of the poem’s last movement. Namely, the thunder does not speak and the Christian myths alluded to throughout the poem are not fulfilled—the waste land instead remains barren and spiritually arid as the Sanskrit lines in place of Christian prayer at the end of the poem more importantly represent a recapitulation of the poem’s opening multilingual epigraph than a signal of conclusion. If “The Waste Land” represents Eliot’s attempt to transcend the limitations of traditional poetic technique (linear narration) and instead write with the dominating twentieth-century ideas of relativity, randomness, and uncertainty in mind, perhaps his intent is to depict a world not only barren of traditional epistemology but also of Christian morality and religious certainty. With this interpretation in mind, Eliot’s world consequently offers an alternative morality that is neither bound by allegiance to a particular god nor rewarded by good faith; in this sense, the waste land is a world beyond good and evil.