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Quinn that "a long poem" that he was "wishful to finish" was
now on paper. "' A lot of scholastic curiosity had
been expended on unravelling even the subtle emotional
disturbances and personal crises in the- life of the poet
during the period. His disastrous married life with Vivien
after a pseudo-honeymoon at Eastbourne, the untimely death
of his father in January 1919, and the utterly unsettling
shantih without-.
- break. In a self-congratulatory squib
i'
T /*
/
community in which poor and wealthy were alike
concerned, and on a Church which bore a vital
relation to the State. Parallel with this, and
related to it, there has been a decay of old moral
and religious order, and a change in the basis of
education which has become more and more strictly
scientific. Religion and classical learning which
once provided myths and legends symbolising the
purposes of society and the role of the individual
, have declined, and the disorder weighs
--
heavily
upon the ser'ious poet, whether in England or
, America. 8
Amy Lowell's opinion that The Waste Land is"a piece of
tripe" sums up the general response of readers to the poem
at the time of its p u b l i ~ a t i o n . ~ The literary waste that
The Waste Land heaped up in its indiscriminate borrowings
from Spenser, Shakespeare, Webster, Frazer, Weston, Verlaine
and St Augustine made it a "cosmopolitan mortgage" 10
according to the Manchester Guardian review of the poem on
thirty first October 1923. At his most unpredictable whim
or will, Eliot threw in quotations, and hid himself behind a
smoke-screen for
/
pundits,
/
pedants and
d
clairv yants to
1%
t
Arsevere at them. The extreme sophistication of Eliot's
-
Tlme also reviewed the poem expressing their concern over
the poetic hypocrisy and snobbery that they could find in
The Waste Land as a very bad precedent, inevitably
/'
corrupting the tastes and trends of the times. F.L Lucas in
hls sensational review of The Waste Land in the New
-
Statesman on third November 1923 praised Eliot's skill in
/conferring of the -
Dial award for poetry on Eliot on twenty
sixth November 1922. The -
Dial editorial set a new tone for
the appreciation of Eliot's poetic efforts, and Edmund
Wilson's review of the poem under the caption "The Poetry of
/
Drought" as a true reflection of the spiritual and emotional
was inevitable in life and art and The Waste Land was the
representatlve symbol of the times. l 9 The cumulative impact
/the critic's admiration for the new myth of the times that
the poem meant for him. The orientation that Leavis gave to
the analysls of the poem as a positive and plausible
literary idiom chara~teristicof the age and its sensibility
finally silenced *the cynicism and doubt of the critics of
the preceding decade.
F.0. Platthiessen in his significant work The
Achlevemerit of T.S. Eliot (1932) made a perceptive analysis
of the textual cohesion that he found in The Waste Land.
F.R. Leavis, inspite of his earnestness to affirm the
greatness of the poem as the expression of modern
sfrl!;ibility, was over - intensi.ve and deliberately self-
I'
-
Land. Matthiessen started from Eliot's contention that the
whole of European literature from Homer was a continuous
whole, a vital tradition. The modern artist being
thoroughly knowledgeable with scientific, psychological,
historical and literary insights cannot but be intensely
aware of the tradition. At the moment of creation, the
compulsions of creativity and tradition converge, creating a
sense of simultaneity and totality of experience. The past
merges into the present and the creative artist feels that
everything is happening at the same time. The educated man
of the modern day too undergoes the same traumatic
experience, and in a way shares the artist's creative
compulsions. It is here that the modern poet and the modern
'
\j
dimensions.
7-
d--
C II '
0
In the ultimate effect, Matthiessen's academic
evalutions 'confirmed the greatness of The Waste Land as the
7
most powerful poetic expression of contemporary
nonciousness, and its sensibility.
l
In 1939 Cleanth Brooks put forward his subtle theory of
the all-permeating irony in The Waste Land in Modern Poetry
and the Tradition. After making an elaborate analysis of
the major symbols, images and references in the five
n ~ T g e ~ s- t
~mep
~ movement;
n- ~ ' ImayEs l l ~ e . r r r ~ m a ~ ~ m n
Brooks concludes
that
craftsmanship and structura Pre is cxccptional
cohesion in the poem.
out the errors in the judgement of able critics like Edmund
poetic
Pointing
f
Wilson and such extreme left-wing litterateurs like Eda Lou
Walton, Cleanth Brooks defines Eliot's essential technique
!
as "the application of the principle of complexity. ,826 He
between the orlginal use of the Tarot cards and the use made
by Madame Sosostris. Each of the details of the cards
assumes new meaning in the general context of the poem. The
broad contrast between the traditional significance of
fortune-telling, and the amusing response extended to it by
the twentieth century audience adds to the contextual irony
of the images in the movement. Images like "the man with
three !staves," "the one-eyed merchant" and "the crowds of
that the poem would have been simple and clear if Eliot had
developed a poetic allegory on moral decadence stringing
together symbols having single and unequivocal meaning. But
/
with the questions of structure and cohesion in The Waste
Land could be felt in a big way in the critical appraisals
of the forties and fifties. On the one hand, the contention
that the poem has a coherent central plane of reality got
consolidated in the writings of Hugh Kenner, Grover Smith /
and Helen Gardner. Conversely, the iconoclastic fervour of
critics like Yvor Winters, Karl Shapiro, David Graig, John
Peter and C.K.Stead got vehement reassertions as rega ds the
/' /"
relevance of the theme, the credibility of the moral
criticism, and the controversial structure, form and erudite
footnote-appendix of The Waste Land. A sweeping survey of .
these discordant arguments and perspectives would become
imperative inorder to assess the immense controversy the The
Waste Land unleashed in our times as no other poem has
/'
done.
Starting from the premise that The Waste Land encodes
,
the embarrassing emotional crises of a highly sensitive
/-
convalescent on a rest cure at Margate, Hugh Kenner argues
that the poem applies the cinematographic technique in
unriivellinq a Bradleya If"zone of consciousness. We cannot
connect nothing wi.th nothing as we move through the loose
sequences of small poems which severally express the ruin of
PB
post-war Europe, the poet's ill-health and irritating /
s e r ~ ~ t u d eto a bank in London, and the inexorable
apprehension that two thousand years of European continuity I
had for the first time run)' dry. Kenner traces the
structural coherence with which the myths of Tiresias, the
Fisher King and the Sibyl have endowed the poem and also
attributes the chess movements that the characters of a
-
Land and Grover Smith has struggled hard to wrestle with the
I
1.
/
interpretative
.
stasis whlch cannot be overcome by any narratological or
enterprise. It is a Purgatorio
4-
-
looking )
,
forward-- to an inferno. 3 0
1.
In her 1972 lecture she confirmed
&--
her earlier argument that even before being edited by Pound,
/ , ' I
r'
*,-
-
Land and Les Fleurs du Mal, he pointed out that Eliot sought
<r 68
His point of argument was that the poem was the product of a
is worth experiencing.
related tc) the rough "rag and bone-shop" poetry that the age
lines:
on the day before Eliot's seventy fifth birth day, and the
anthology was very much appreciated by the reviewers in
Times Literary Supplement and in New Statesman. Donald
Davie of New Statesman pointed out that the essential
characteristic of Eliot's poetry is that it pre-supposed a
"syrnboliste" language like ~ a l l a r m g , from which a poetic
consciousness, and a sense of narrative events erupted in
terms, and Robert Lowell and Allen Tate came out with
excellent tributes. A special memorial service at
Westminister Abbey, and a recital of his poems at the Globe
i-'
The seventies began with the tone of renouncing Eliot's
8 'i
in itself, whereas Williams had initiated
"beginning." a
35
C Y Robert Greley and Duncan rejected Eliot as a poetic model.
~liot still fascinated inquisitive minds, and
biographical criticism became the order of the day. Donald
Gallup's T.S. Eliot: A Biography, was perhaps the beginning,
and 1,yndall Gordon's Eliot's Early Years published in 1977 L/
was the best attempt to fix the texts in Eliot's
biographical contexts. E. Martin Browne's The Makinq of
T.S. Eliot's P l a y s (1970), and John D. Margolis' T.S.
George's T.S. Eliot: His Mind and Art (1963) and B.N.
Chaturvedi's T.S. Eliot (1963) are some of the early
Sonjoy Dutta Roy, "'The Death of the Author': T.S. Eliot and
Contemporary Criticism" by Rajnath and "T.S. Eliot, Y.B.
Yeats and 'Tradition"' by Vinod Sena. These writers combine
mind.
-
Charles Powell, "Manchcster Guardian Review," T.S.
Helen Gardner, "The Waste Land: Paris,1992," Eliot in
1973) 67.
Gardner 69
55.
Gardner 70.
Gardner 67
Basu 12.
8.
l4 Basu 13-14
l5 Basu 14.
Hinchliffe 156.
27 Brooks 157.
3 4 Basu 22.
35 Basu 23.
36 Basu 24.
37 Basu 25.
41
Raveendran 133.