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   kc4u Teacher
   College - Senior

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   It is difficult to judge, you see. The landscape is too too bleak in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to think of a championing, sublime and salvationist notion of art. But that is not to say, it has no role at all. The artist figure in the world of the poem is like that old, humiliated and disbelieved prophet Tiresias. He dares to speak the truth however bitter and horrible it may be but is never trusted. He still tells the truth, nonetheless. Such is the tragic failure of art, which is still a lesson in persistence, courage and exactitude.

   The artist is seen as a potential revivalist who wants to recover the past, a world of harmony, but not by escaping the holes in the present. He is a mythological journey-maker, a searcher of meaning and significance, who looks for the sacred chalice like Gallahad. Though what the thunder says at the end as an encrypted message of salvation remains undeciphered and too little too late, perhaps. But Eliot also implies a cultural fusion in spiritual terms and a combination of the Oriental and the Occidental might well be seen as an alternative to the failing meta-narrative of Christianity in the post-war situation.

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   Posted by kc4u on Saturday October 31, 2009 at 11:34 AM