T. S. Eliot’s the Waste Land and the Poetics of the Mythical Method

Current critical debate discusses contemporary poetry in terms of the Pound, Stevens or Williams’ era, forgetting T. S. Eliot, the poet who presided over the literary scenario for almost half a century. Eliot’s bookishness, political conservatism and religious leanings, together with the Modernist cultivation of an erudite, culturally charged idiom, have constituted a serious source of critical discontent. For the adepts of Marxist hermeneutics, his work came to represent “a privileged, closed, authoritative and exclusive form of discourse”.1 In the Seventies and Eighties, Modernist high art came under attack, and was perceived as inimical to the democratic ethos. The popular argument against high culture was that it had turned its back on egalitarianism, advocating an art for the initiated few and expressing elitist disdain for the masses’ lack of cultural preparation. Difficult Modernist aesthetics, soon branded as “aristocratic”, were considered foreign, divisive, and difficult. In this context, tradition, culture, order or the spirit of Europe, values that Eliot embraced, became a way of getting around social inequalities and class privilege. To the postmodern sensibility, Eliot had become an example of formal and intellectual closure, having apparently little to contribute to the new experimental and open forms. The new poetic idioms initiated an overt rebellion against Eliotic Modernism. According to prevailing misapprehensions, Eliot would have imposed poetic propriety at the expense of the more intuitive, visionary aspects of imagination. Eliot’s notion of impersonality was soon misunderstood as a way of repressing the subjective and instinctual dimensions of selfhood. To him emotions and feelings would have been subsidiary to reason, order, authority and form, concepts banned from the postmodern agenda. Eliot’s concept of impersonality has been misinterpreted as a way of fitting the psyche into the Procustean bed of the willful ego. From this vantage