The Waste Land

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Waste Land, The, poem on the theme of the sterility and chaos of the contemporary world by T.S. Eliot, published in 1922. This most widely known expression of the despair of the postwar era has as a structural framework the symbolism of certain fertility myths that reputedly formed the pagan origins of the Christian Grail legend.

The Waste Land itself is a desolate and sterile country ruled by an impotent king, and the poem is divided into five parts: “The Burial of the Dead,” representing the rebirth of the land after the barren winter; “The Game of Chess,” a contrast between the splendor of the past and the squalor of modern life; “The Fire Sermon,” vignettes of the sordidness of modern life; “Death by Water,” the vision of a drowned Phoenician sailor who at least dies by water, not thirst; and “What the Thunder Said,” representing the decay of modern Europe through symbols of the Grail legend. The poem concludes with quotations from the Upanishads, its last word, three times repeated, being “Shantih,” meaning “the peace which passeth understanding.” In the 433 lines of the poem are included quotations from, allusions to, or imitations of some 35 different writers, as well as several popular songs and passages in six foreign languages, including Sanskrit. The original poem was far longer than the published text, which was severely pruned and edited by Ezra Pound, to whom the work is dedicated. The original version with Pound's annotations was published in 1971.

Waste Land, The, a poem by T. S. Eliot, first published 1922 in the Criterion.

It consists of five sections, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’, and ‘What the Thunder Said’, together with Eliot's own ‘Notes’ which explain his many varied and multicultural allusions, quotations, and half-quotations (from Webster, Dante, Verlaine, Kyd, etc.), and express a general indebtedness to the Grail legend and to the vegetation ceremonies in Frazer's The Golden Bough. The poem was rapidly acclaimed as a statement of the post-war sense of depression and futility; it was seriously praised by I. A. Richards as ‘a perfect emotive description of a state of mind which is probably inevitable for a while to all meditative people’ (Science and Poetry, 1926), and less seriously but significantly chanted as a kind of protest against the older generation by the undergraduates of the day. Complex, erudite, cryptic, satiric, spiritually earnest, and occasionally lyrical, it became one of the most recognizable landmarks of Modernism, an original voice speaking through many echoes and parodies of echoes. Eliot himself remarked that the poem could be seen not so much as ‘an important bit of social criticism’, but as ‘the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.’