T.S. Elliot, The Wasteland and modernism

T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland” and Modernism.

Elliot was both influenced by modernism and a reference of it. The dramatic change in form and content in literature (and human beliefs) of the last nineteenth century and the early twentieth century is noticeable in the poem. The Wasteland is also a reflection of the between wars years and also a prophecy for all that were to come. Elliot masters the form in the poem to create a sense of pessimism, decadence and fugacity. It is often said that his form is sometimes difficult to understand, but the wasteland itself is an exercise of uninteligelibility.
The relevance of the poem lays in the presentation of the speaker (or speakers) and the development of their thoughts, along with its “exotic” imagery. Although some analogies may be drawn, the wasteland is so ambiguous that everything could mean everything else.
This is well depicted by Elliot himself in the phrase that says:
“You cannot say or guess, for you only know
A broken heap of pictures [where the sun gleams…]”
So Elliot writes a thought, utterance or writing (by him or everyone else) about how ambiguous is everything, and how little we know about even what we think we know. In this sense, he is pretty much like James Joyce, being his main representative example Ulysses.

The pessimistic view is understandable, the first and second world wars made catastrophic impacts among the population, and a sense of de-humanization and a lack of faith on god provoked what later was called as the “modern” man. The Wasteland only marks the beginning of what was to come, however is also remarkable that Elliot himself was a very pessimistic person, so his own influence reinforce the pessimistic view of the world or “the land” as “the waste land”.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding.”
He not only devalues spring as a subject of art as in classic times, he also laments the fact of the reproduction and the going on of life, so the real big deal in the wasteland is not its pessimism, but that Elliot himself knew about optimism, and the going on of life, the infinite circle (as other poets reflected as emerson, Whitman or yeats) but instead he attacks it with its own blade, he regrets the pass of time, rather to valuate it. He writes about fear, not about hope. To sum up, his general view upon humanity is more negative than pessimist, or maybe he wrote in so pessimistic tone to regret about the pessimist future that there were to come.

But what is good or bad? Elliot’s view is a pessimistic one, however in the poem we can see a lot of analogies about the past, and the good times. So after all Elliot’s view could be only a melancholy for the “old good days” rather than a prophecy for the modernist paradigm that was being realized.

However this is also the origin of modernism, the total rupture with the past, the grievous lament for the good and exotic old days, at least in Elliot’s thoughts. The breaking from god, not only in a romantic point of view (for even romanticism was over), but for a total lack of interest in human evolution and affection, whose effect was war and decadence. It is not strange, then, that Elliot’s work was considered a referent in the modernist period, if also we consider that we are in the “post-modernist” period, whatever this could mean, for next generations.

On the other hand, We'd say that the imagery of the wasteland is also very vivid. Despite of the pessimistic point of view, although some times the references are very difficult to understand (or almost unintelligible if you don’t know anything about the author’s life) Elliot himself wanted to draw such a portrait, as a surrealist artist makes surrealist art. Because after all, although we give all the explanations and references possible, there is something else that misses. The life itself, the experience, the individuality that can not be shared, not the broken heap of pictures, that after all is always incomplete. The quality of life, that is even more important than life itself, and our impossibility to reflect it, in art, or in everything else. For we do not always realize how precious life is.

The poem is so associative that eventually seems totally dissasociative, a kind of mental meditation as Elliot said, but more for him that for ourselves, because he in fact knows every reference of every apparent “dissasociative” group of words.