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UNDERSTANDING MODERNIST LITERARY SENSIBILITY
THROUGH ELIOT’S THE WASTE LAND
by
BSL Shilpa | Faculty | Maharaja Aggarsen Institute of Management | Rohini, Delhi
ABSTRACT
The paper aims to understand the prominent and most defining
features of modernism and specifically modernist poetry. The paper
aims to examine the singularly defining poem of The Waste Land
as the most demonstrative and representative work of modernist
poetry. By this paper we will be able to understand the literary
sensibilities of the epoch-making literary movements of English
literature, i.e. the modernism.
KEYWORDS: Modernism, Modernist, T.S. Eliot, Waste Land, Literature
INTRODUCTION
Modernism is a cultural movement that swept through a variety of art forms. It is a complex and
a difficult concept. This paper aims to identify a its most important characteristic features of the
movement.
Modernism as a Challenge to the Traditional Literary forms:
Modernism is a very broad term used to refer to the radical changes that occurred in the works
and productions of artists – writers, painters, and musicians- during the last decades of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In literature, modernism is a
twentieth century literary movement that emerged as a reaction and response to the aftermath of
the First World War of the industrial world. Besides being reactionary, it is also revolutionary as
it marks a clear break from the past literary sensibilities. Modernist writers acutely felt the need
to invent new literary forms as they felt that the traditional literary forms and frameworks as
being outdated and insufficient to encompass the new world realities post world war.
So the modernist writers felt the need to push the boundaries of the traditional literature and to
experiment with the fundamentals of the literary forms and writing in terms of narrative
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techniques, plot construction, imagery, language, etc. so that they are able to create new literary
forms and norms to accommodate the new experiences of the post war world. Hooti and Omrani
(2011) refer to this process as a “creative violence" (Levenson, 2002, p.2) as it deviates from the
literary tradition and turns the holistic and taken-for- granted literary concepts into new internal
and mental trends. Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction "Make it new!" became the clarion call of the
movement and was most paradigmatic approach towards the obsolete.
Virginia Woolf said this of the literary voices of modern reality:
We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale – the war, the sudden slip of
masses held in position for ages – has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the
past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves
doing, saying or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers.
So one of the essential qualities of the modernist literature is that it is experimental, formally
complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as well as creation. Thus, modernism in
literature drew curtains on the prevalent art that comfortably fetched sympathetic images from
nature and instead chose to shock the reader into realization by presenting the disturbing realities
surrounding them using complex symbols and images and sought to associate notions of the
artistic freedom to represent newer literary content of cultural apocalypse and disaster and freed
the writer from traditional genre and form.
To make it even clearer it is important for us to know that the term modernism is different from
the term modern. Modernism or modernist refers to this literary movement that challenged the
conventional literary sensibilities and traditional literary forms while the term modern refers to
any literary work that is contemporary or new. Literary modernism is thereby a vast field of
work that includes the works of many writers – both European and American - who are central to
modernism include Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James
Joyce, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, William Butler Yeats,
Wallace Stevens, Carl Strindberg, Eugene O’Neill, Bertolt Brecht, May Sinclair, Rosy
Macaulay, Edith Sitwell, Rebecca West, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Henry James,
D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams Marianne Moore, W.H.
Auden, and Stephen Spender to name a few.
For the purpose of this study, Eliot’s iconic work The Waste Land which is considered to be the
anthem of modernist poetic tradition will be examined to understand the modernist tradition and
sensibilities. Frank Kermode, says that it is a modernist epic coming over to us as a unique
sample of new poetry emerging over four decades of historical development (180-1920) in the
English poetic tradition. Neil (2001) in Companion to Twentieth Century Poets, says the poem
first published in 1922, is the landmark poem of the transatlantic modernist movement.
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International in both content and provenance, it stunned readers with its disjunctive style, its
wide-ranging allusions, and its polyphonic use of languages.
Desolation as an inevitable aspect of the modernist sensibility:
In Science and Poetry (1926) 1.A Richards, succinctly considered the issues of content and
technique in “The Waste Land”. He identifies a sense of desolation that the poem tries to express
as the primary aspect of the modernist sensibility prevailing as an expression of the experience of
the age in which they lived. In the five sections of The Waste Land, Eliot describes the new
modern city as being hopeless, lifeless, devoid of light and passion. Through his bleak
description of the modern day man, Eliot conveys his sense of disgust towards the modern world.
He feels estranged from this world in which the living is dead, communication severed, gender
identity lost, and the carnal human desire has come to rule. Deshmukh (2010) in his analysis of
the Waste Land notes that Eliot expresses that the modern world, he believes, is corrupt to the
point of no hope. Through his use of allusion and descriptive diction Eliot creates for the reader
this wretched and lifeless modern world through the looking glass of his own perceptions and
emotions.
 The poem is full of images that show desolation and despair:
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
 The poem shows disgust to the modern world by contrasting it to the pre-industrial world
of Spenser A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
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On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
DISRUPTIVE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
The poem when first read challenges the reader to keep pace with the changing voices, ages,
character, and places without any announcement. Adding to the changes, there is seems at first
an indiscriminate borrowings from Spenser, Shakespeare, Webster, Frazer, Weston, Verlaine and
St Augustine that makes the poetic structure disruptive, discontinuous, and diverged. This quality
of fragmented literary structure and intentional zig-zagging through the mysterious allusions at
first evoked negative critical responses to the poem on its publication. Amy Lowell's called The
Waste Land as "a piece of tripe" which was also the general response of readers to the poem at
the time of its publication. Manchester Guardian review also dubbed the poem as “a
cosmopolitan mortgage” and said that Eliot threw in quotations, and hid himself behind a smokescreen for pundits, pedants and clairvoyants to persevere at them.
But later on a closer examination it was realised that the disruptive poetic structure was a
deliberate poetic technique adopted to express what modernist writers genuinely felt that the
unity that existed prior to the World War had been shattered by the war. And, to express the
disunity in the “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history” they
adopted a technique that would deliberately breach the continuity and literary forms. I.A.
Richards in his critical evaluation of the poem established the fact that the fragmentariness and
the unexpected poetic contexts appear as a consistent poetic device used by the poet throughout
The Waste Land. Similarly, But , F.R. Leaves says the breach of continuity and the consequent
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uprooting of life that the machine age brought about as an inevitable consequence required a new
metaphor and idiom for self—expression.
F.R. Leaves also said in his examination of the poem, that the fragmentariness in fact lends a
unity to the poem. The different vignettes - Hycinthus and her lover, Stetson, Lil and her
husband, Madame Sosostris , Mr Eugenedis, the typist, the young man carbuncular - although
seemingly different actually make a mosaic of experiences connected to one another in a unique
and a distinct way.
COMPLEXITY AND DIFFICULTY IN UNDERSTANDING
Due to the disruptive narrative technique and use of complex myths and intertextuality, the
modernist works are often considered to be complex and ambiguious to understand. In addition
modernist writers also resorted to the symbols and images that helped them to create an
objective correlative of their own vision or experience and also helped the readers to “penetrate
far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word” with the images.
The Waste Land was criticised for its ambiguity.
As an evidence of its difficulty, Epson a passage from the poem as an example of ambiguity in
his Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) without any doubts regarding the greatness of the poem or
the genius of the poet. The first seventeen lines of "A Game of Chess” in The Waste Land have
been analysed by Wiliam Empson in his” Seven Types of Ambiguity” to explicate the ambiguity
of syntax, which according to him has been exquisitely accomplished by the poet so as to stand
out as a dramatic and lyrical high light.
And, this complexity and intellectualization is a important part of modernist poetry.
SEXUAL THEMES
The content of the modernist works were explicitly open and overt in discussing issues realted to
sexuality and gender. The earlier romantic passion of love was now being replaced by the
mechanical sexual encounters that were devoid of any love and passion. The subverted sexual
relationships such as rape, loveless sex, perverted relationships became far more pronounced and
prominent in the works of the modernist writers.
Hope to find meaning and an escape from their desolate existence:
Although modernists and their work expresses the emptiness and desolation of their present
plight and existence, they are still in hope of finding some meaning and purpose, however
temporarily, in their present situation. For this, the modernist poets would constantly try to
reclaiming the past or would have a philosophy to counter the disturbing realities. In the Waste
Land we see Eliot doing both: The Waste Land has both pagon and Christian myths Talking of
myths, the Grail legend, the vegetation myth and the rebirth of the year, the fertility myth and the
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rebirth of potency, the Christian myth of Christ's death and resurrection comes alive in a mosaic
of suggestive meaning.
In the brief essay entitled "Ulysses, Order and Myth" that Eliot wrote in The Dial in November
1923, he spoke of the effective use of myth as a device with which a poet could manipulate "a
continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.
Besides modernists writers wanted to escape and reclaiming some lost faith and Eliot offers such
a hope not only through the use of myth but also a philosophical message from Indian
Upanishad’s in the section “What the Thunder Said?”
CONCLUSION
Modernism or modernist is thus a term that represents a movement that completely transformed
the literary scenario of the world for ever. It was both reactionary and revolutionary. The
quintessential features of modernism is that modernist literature is experimental, changing the
traditional literary forms, it uses disruptive narrative technique and symbolism to a great extent,
and it also uses myths as a means of structuring the work. It is generally considered to be
complex especially for readers who are not initiated into the new kind of literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.
Bhagawati, D. (2012). Myths in “The Waste Land” . IJCAES , 337.
2.
DESHMUKH, S. J. (2015). T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Critical Analysis. Indian
Journal of Applied Research, 315.
3.
Empson, W. (1930). Seven Types of Ambiguity . London: Chatto and Windus.
4.
F.R.Lcavis. (1932). New Bearings in English Poetry . London: Chatto and Windus.
5.
Kermode, F. (n.d.). A Babylonish Dialect. In T.S. Eliot:The Vlastc Land: A Casebook (p.
234). Cox and Hinchliffe.
6.
Richards, I. (1924). Principles of Literary Criticism. In "The Poetry of T.S. Eliot" (p. 295).
London: Routledge and Keyan Paul, 1955.
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