The Structure

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When Eliot first published The Waste Land in 1922, it caused a colossal stir in the literary world and in society in general. Eliot’s use of nontraditional techniques, his gritty imagery, and the sheer incoherence of the work as a whole mystified, enraged, and enthralled readers and critics. As Helen Vendler notes in her 1998 Time article, “Modern poetry had struck its note.” In fact, readers had never seen anything quite this modern before. The poem seemed to have a little bit of everything, and was much meatier than the other literary offerings of the time, and not just in Europe. Vendler notes that “Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines.” But even though every reference in Eliot’s apocalyptic opus has since been documented, and one can begin to draw parallels among the poem’s many pieces, most critics agree that these pieces will probably never be assembled into one cohesive whole. The poem’s structure defies that type of interpretation.

When one discusses the structure of a modernist work like The Waste Land, it helps to break it down into two types, structure on a large scale and structure on a small scale. On the large scale, the poem has a clear structure. It is organized into five sections, each of which is numbered and labeled, almost in the style of a traditional poem. Yet, in her entry on Eliot for Dictionary of Literary Biography, Jewel Spears Brooker says that these five sections, “by traditional standards, seem unrelated.” The key word is “traditional.” Part of the joy involved in modernist writing was in not playing by the traditional rules. Still, Eliot did not choose his structure on a whim. In fact, when viewed from a modernist perspective, one that emphasizes the rough sense of the poem, rather than its specific, objectifiable meaning, one can offer up an interpretation for Eliot’s choice of large-scale structure.

The first section is “The Burial of the Dead” deals mainly with issues of death. The second section “A Game of Chess” deals mainly with issues of sex. The third section “The Fire Sermon” also deals with sexual issues. The fourth section “Death by Water” deals with issues of death. The final section, “What the Thunder Said,” is mainly about resurrection or restoration, which may or may not be attainable. So, if one were to write out these general themes in order, it would go: death, sex, sex, death, possible restoration. One of the first noticeable aspects about this order is that the first four sections are symmetrical. The two sections on death bookend the two sections on sex, almost as if the second two sections are a mirror image of the first two. When a poet deliberately juxtaposes thematic material like this, it usually means something. This is especially true when a modernist poet imposes a distinguishable form on his or her poetry. This ordering of themes becomes even more suspicious when one looks at the length of the fourth section. When compared to the others, this is almost not a section at all. If Eliot had left it out, however, it would have destroyed his symmetry.

So what does this mean? Why is Eliot interested in this symmetry? To answer this question, it is first necessary to examine the small-scale structural techniques that Eliot uses in the poem. Again, if traditional analysis techniques were used, this reader would examine the poem line by line and stanza by stanza, searching for the connections among them. As James S. Torrens notes in his 1997 article on the poem in America: “How many undergraduates since 1922 have sweated their way through this labyrinth and come out dazzled, or completely dazed.” The fact is, applying traditional analysis to the poem is a fruitless effort, for the poem exists not in the logical world, but in a world of indefinite reality, which disorients the reader.

But from Eliot’s point of view, the reader needs to be disoriented. Society has become too stale and exists in a state of living death, where crowds of these walking dead file off to work, exhaling “Sighs, short and infrequent.” Even the sighs of despair and disillusionment are “infrequent,” because this society is lost and does not even have the energy to sigh. Eliot is attempting to shake up society and get people to, as he notes during the second section, through the mouthpiece of the rich woman: “Think.” To do this, to shake up people and force them to think about the current state of society, Eliot structures his poem in episodes. On the small scale, these episodes help him hook readers, even as he disorients them. Within each section, Eliot divides the narrative into episodes that invoke aspects of the past, the present, and in many cases both. Time and place shift with little or no transition, like the clicks of a camera shutter. And as the poem progresses, Eliot clicks his poetic shutter rapidly, populating his bizarre landscape, his waste land, with a litany of historical and mythological figures. In this surreal, constantly changing setting, Vendler notes that Buddha is juxtaposed “with St. Augustine, and Ovid next to Wagner,” illogical placements that defy traditional modes of thought.

This leads back to the reason behind Eliot’s conscious choice to include a symmetrical largescale structure. In the long scope of human history and experience, Buddha and Augustine are linked, as are Ovid and Wagner and the countless other seemingly contradictory pairings in the poem. By choosing Weston’s myth of the Fisher King—a seminal myth that is thought to have ultimately influenced many religious stories, including the Christian quest for the Holy Grail—Eliot is indicating that they are one and the same, mirror images of each other. Likewise, Eliot’s modern society and the other past societies refered to in the poem are also mirror images of each other, which is why he juxtaposes “Jerusalem” with “London,” for example, and ultimately, why he chooses to make the first four sections reflect this mirror image concept.

However, the final section does not fit this symmetry, which makes sense too. This final section is also the most ambiguous. The first four are clearly about either death or sex. The fourth is about restoration, but it leaves the question of possible restoration open-ended, by providing mixed commentary at the end in the foreign phrases. Eliot offers some insight into this with the line directly before these foreign phrases: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Some critics say that this statement is Eliot’s introduction to the foreign phrases themselves, which are just fragments of thoughts. Others say that this is Eliot’s commentary on the fragmentary nature of the entire poem itself. The latter interpretation seems to make more sense.

In his 1923 review of the poem for New Republic, Conrad Aiken sees the fragmentary, incoherent nature of the poem as its greatest strength and says that the work must be taken as

A brilliant and kaleidoscopic confusion; as a series of sharp, discrete, slightly related perceptions and feelings, dramatically and lyrically presented, and violently juxtaposed, (for effect of dissonance) so as to give us an impression of an intensely modern, intensely literary consciousness which perceives itself to be not a unit but a chance correlation or conglomerate of mutually discolorative fragments.

In other words, while readers familiar with traditional, neatly ordered poetry might look for the poet to tell them what they need to know, Eliot very shrewdly conceals his true thoughts behind his fragmentary structure, which ultimately reflects the chaos of the poet’s modern, disillusioned society, even as its links it to humanity’s shared past through its use of mirror image. Like the mythical quest hero who must undergo trials and assemble information to earn restoration, Eliot’s readers must review the various, fragmentary pieces of the poem and pull from it the ideas that make the most sense to them. The important thing, as Eliot indicates, is to be engaged in this process in the first place. Because when people wake up from their moral stupor and start thinking about the current state of society, then maybe they will also be motivated to work toward improving it.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “The Waste Land,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2004.

The Literary Impact

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A bombshell burst upon the world of modern poetry 75 years ago this November in the pages of the New York literary journal The Dial—T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The author had published this outpouring in England a month earlier in his own magazine, The Criterion; and in December, Boni & Liveright was to bring it out in book form, with the famous footnotes to fill out empty pages. A corporation lawyer in New York, John Quinn, put up $2,000 for The Dial prize of that year, an astonishing sum that relieved the author of the burden of medical and other expenses weighing on him.

The 434 lines of “The Waste Land”—in lengths and bunches that might seem totally random— thrilled and bewildered early readers. They found in it the following: stream-of-consciousness writing, sudden switches of scene as in film clips, motifs from classical and medieval myth, exposure of the libido a la Dr. Freud, music-hall rag, anxiety before the Bolshel vik menace and borrowings from the sacred books of East and West.

Robert Penn Warren remembered that “undergraduates were reading it all over the place, memorizing it.” How many undergraduates since 1922 have sweated their way through this labyrinth and come out dazzled, or completely dazed. I confess to having led many of these expeditions, with sovereign and unwarranted self-confidence. The process is still worth recreating at this anniversary time.

“The Waste Land” comes in five parts, starting with “The Burial of the Dead,” a name taken from the Anglican funeral ceremony. The famous opening line yields a shock: “April is the cruellest month.” Quite a switch from that upbeat start of the most famous poem in English, “The Canterbury Tales,” where the pilgrims set off to their shrine amid the unfolding panoply of spring. But the days after World War I were no time for medieval optimism. What Eliot wants to highlight is the pain of coming back to life.

The imagery and episodes of Part One evoke a person, indeed a civilization, numbed, distressed. Coherence and meaning have gone out of the world, as a prophetic voice with an Old Testament sound announces: “Son of man . . . you know only / a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / and the dead tree gives no shelter.”

To convey a vague menace, and recreate the craze for spiritualism at the turn of the century, Eliot introduces “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,” with her “wicked pack” of Tarot cards. She tells an implied hearer (the reader, actually): Your card is “the drowned Phoenician sailor.” How ominous. He follows this up memorably with the sketch of London on a business morning, with all its robot workers pouring in to the office with an exhalation of sighs as if from Dante’s “Inferno.”

Early critics summed up “The Waste Land” as expressing the disillusionment of a generation. This interpretation galled the author, who claims he never had illusions to begin with, and who can be seen anxiously searching for any signs of life. The poem addresses a Londoner named Stetson sarcastically: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / has it begun to sprout? . . . Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to mend or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” What dog? Perhaps Anubis, the dog-headed god of Egypt who conducts the dead to immortal regions. All dogs love to dig up, of course. When Eliot wrote these lines, he was emerging from psychotherapy in Lausanne, Switzerland, which had forced him to dig up a lot of his own troubling history.

The poet, throughout “The Waste Land,” puzzles over the apparent disconnection between sex and love, flesh and spirit. He does so through a recurring figure, the quester, as in medieval versions of the quest for the Holy Grail. The quester early on proves incapable of the romantic innocence offered by the hyacinth girl, with an armful of flowers.

Eliot calls Part Two “A Game of Chess,” a metaphor for sexual maneuvering. He begins again by rewriting a classical set piece, the wide-eyed report by the soldier Enobarbus about the opulent queen Cleopatra on her barge, from Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” Eliot gives us instead a pampered woman in her palatial bedchamber, immersed in anything that could arouse the senses (“synthetic perfumes,” illustrations of a mythological rape). This passage, sumptuous but labored, shifts suddenly into Eliot’s forte, a dramatic dialogue giving us the real measure of the jaded woman:

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.
Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak.
Speak.
What are you thinking of?” . . .
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

At one time the author had thought of naming this poem after a line from Dickens, “He Do the Police in Many Voices,” in the spirit of English parlor games with their popular charades. He does his mimicry best in a pub scene, in Cockney English, concerning a certain Lil, whose soldierhusband, in the days before contraceptives, has worn her down with his appetite for sex. It ends, famously, as the bartender calls out, “Hurry up please it’s time”—suggesting judgment is imminent—and the customers go off with a drunken “Goonight.”

This painful vision of humanity swept up in lust continues in Part Three, “The Fire Sermon,” which takes its name from the preachment of Buddha about all things being consumed by desire. Again Eliot replays an English masterpiece, the Renaissance wedding ode of Edmund Spenser, “Prothalamion,” which chants in a refrain, “Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.” But “The Waste Land,” no celebratory flow, evokes the shores of a wintry Thames River long after the casual lovers have left their sandwich paper, silk handkerchiefs and bottles. “The nymphs are departed. / And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors.”

Eliot’s imagery takes a step into the nightmarish, a surreal world of the grinning skeleton, the “rat’s foot creeping,” plus “white bodies naked on the low damp ground / and bones cast in a little low dry garret” (a gruesome fusing of sex and death). Yet the passage ends with a wistful reminder of innocence— children’s song resounding in a cupola.

Then Part Three unfurls its narratives of desire. In the first, very briefly, a Near Eastern merchant makes his oily offer of a homosexual weekend. Then, at length, we watch the loveless connection of a typist and the “small house agent’s clerk” who comes to her apartment, “one of the low on whom assurance sits / as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.” “She is bored and tired;” but since “his vanity requires no response,” he takes his sexual pleasure. We don’t get the graphic details, but rather a quick intervention from the narrator of this tawdry scene, Tiresias, the mythical peeping Tom, who has “foresuffered all / enacted on this same divan or bed.”

Throughout “The Waste Land” Eliot sows allusions to “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s late romance in which a mysterious providential action saves the victims of shipwreck. The quester quotes: “This music crept by me upon the waters.” The music, in this one bright spot, comes from a public bar in Lower Thames Street that still preserves sociability and a dignity from the past.

Eliot then changes the cadence for a short-line impressionistic contrast of the mercantile present (oily merchant ships coming up the tide) with a regal past (Queen Elizabeth with her favorite, Leicester, in a Cleopatra-like barge on the Thames). After which come some brief exempla of lust, in women’s voices, and concluding words from the Buddha—”burning burning burning burning”— along with the exclamation of relief from the once lustful Augustine: “O Lord thou pluckest me out.”

In Part Four, “Death by Water,” our poet delivers a quick, highly concentrated homily on the fate of an adventurer-quester of the old Mediterranean, a Phoenician sailor. He undergoes the judgment of the sea. The intoning voice aims this homily at the reader, who still has his Tarot card with the seaman’s picture.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight
dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep
sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he
rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and
youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to
windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once
handsome and tall as you.

Ezra Pound, Eliot’s self-proclaimed mentor, had the chance to blue pencil many a line from the original version of “The Waste Land,” which the poet showed him in Paris, as he was returning to London from Lausanne. Pound’s surgery was most radical for Part Four, which he clipped down (much to its benefit) to the size reproduced above. The author responded with a dedication naming Pound, in words from Dante, il miglior fabbro, “the best of workmen.”

Now comes the most powerful and challenging section of “The Waste Land,” Part Five, “What the Thunder Said” (a phrase from a Hindu Upanishad), asking whether rain will come to our parched souls, or life return to our society panting for grace. Eliot intertwines allusions to the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks, Christ’s agony in the garden, the collapse of Babylon according to the Apocalypse and the finding of the Holy Grail. Consider the following passage, which plays on the theme of the Mysterious Stranger. The reader comes away asking, Do we have here a beneficent Christ on the road to Emmaus, or a menacing specter?

Who is the third who walks always
beside you?
When I count, there are only you and
I together
But when I look ahead up the white
road
There is always another one walking
beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle,
hooded
I do not know whether a man or a
woman
—But who is that on the other side of
you?

The concluding lines of “The Waste Land” do not so much resolve The question, How shall things end up for us? as pose a three-part challenge, in a voice of thunder: GIVE of yourself, “in the awful daring of a moment’s surrender” (which may be what Eliot did in his costly marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood); SYMPATHIZE, get through to others, who are so much like yourself, “each in his prison / thinking of the key”; CONTROL: Exert some loving initiative and expect some beloved’s response.

Not to end his potpourri of a poem neatly, because there is no neat resolution to our affairs, Eliot concludes it with a shower of one-line allusions, signaling collapse of society, then expiation, then urge for innocence. His final words are a Hindu invocation, almost a blessing, for the reader whom he has pulled through this ordeal: Shantih shantih shantih (“Peace,” three times).

To the initiate, “The Waste Land”—brilliant if maddening pastiche, anguished outcry against human impurity, meditation on the decline of the West-has an endless fascination. In its 75th year it remains as elusive, as haunting, as thought-provoking as ever.

The 1990’s do not happen to be a good season for T. S. Eliot stock, which was once soaring. Political correctness has banished him into outer darkness for some stereotypes of Jews that seem present in earlier poems and, in his longing for a Christian society, for drawing the boundaries a bit tight. Already in Eliot’s day some contemporaries bemoaned and rued the ascendancy of this dizzying poem. William Carlos Williams, in his fervent desire for more writing “in the American grain” and his battle against dependence on the European tradition, wrung his hands and declared that “The Waste Land” had set our poetry back at least a generation.

What to say about this attack on “The Waste Land” for its allusiveness? The first thing is to acknowledge plainly that it takes form as a brilliant Ph.D. exam on European literature and culture, a genre that does not admit repeating. Eliot never tried the method again himself. But what a fine vehicle it proved to be for meditating on the fate of civilization after World War I—and in particular for probing, radically, the most precious documents of the Great Tradition. Eliot was also ciphering his own struggle with sin and for sanity and salvation.

In short, “The Waste Land” is still worth every penny that John Quinn offered in obeisance to it and, with all the reservations one might muster, it remains sans pareil.

Source: James Torrens, “T. S. Eliot: 75 years of The Waste Land,” in America, Vol. 177, No. 12, October 25, 1997, pp. 24–27.

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Critical Overview