T.S. ELIOT (1888-1965)  was born at St Louis, Missouri, of an old England family.

He was educated at
Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, Oxford. He settled in England
where he was for a time schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for Faber and Faber.
In 1914 he met Ezra Pound. In 1923 he founded the influential literary journal ‘The Criterion’. ‘The Waste
Land’ appeared in in the very first issue; the poem which explored the disintegration of values in the
modern world was highly innovative and established Eliot as a major poet and significant spokesman for his
generation. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen. It was about this time that he entered the Anglican
Church. The major work of this period express his search for religious certainties. They include ‘The hallow
man’, ‘Journey of the Magi’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday’ culminate in the ‘Four Quartets’. In 1948 he won the
Nobel Prize for literature. He was an extremely prolific and versatile writer, even writing a book for
children’s poems ‘Old Possum’s book of practical cats’ which was later transformed by Webber into the
highly successful musical, ‘Cats’. During his life he also wrote several works of criticism including ‘The sacred
wood’:

 Essay on poetry and criticism

 Notes towards the definition of culture

 On poetry and poets

Which formed a vital part of his approach to writing poetry. He died in London in 1965.

The complexity  he followed his belief that poetry should not aim at a presentation necessarily of the
complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation leads to difficult poetry. For
Eliot this complexity results from the fragmentation of the western cultural, mythological and religious
tradition which he sees as a result of modernity and the processes of industrialization, mass production and
consumerism. Alienated modern man no longer experiences a coherent sense of moral and religious
community with his fellow men. His actions are no longer governed by a shared ethical code and he himself
is morally and spiritually empty. Relations between the sexes too have become empty and loveless. Eliot
sees his poetic mission as that of piecing together this broken world and finding redemption by creating a
men symbolic system out of significant fragments that remain of the old and by fusing western traditions
with those of the other culture. Through his poetry Eliot attempts to convey an emotion without a direct
statement what he calls ‘objective correlative’.

THE WASTE LAND  long poem, published in 1922, first in London and next in New York. The 443 lines, five
parts poem was dedicated to fellow poet Ezra Pound. The ‘Waste Land’ expresses with great power the
disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of fragmentary vignettes, loosely
linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts
and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The depiction of spiritual emptiness
in the secularized city, the decay of ‘urbs aeterna’ (the “eternal city”), is not a simple contrast of the heroic
past with the degraded present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and
moral evil. The poem initially met with controversy as its complex and erudite style was alternately
denounced for its obscurity and praised for its Modernism. The basic structure of the poem exemplifies this
notion that technology has contributed to this fragmentation of society. The Waste Land’s structure is
rooted in machines. The poem consists of five sections: ‘The burial of the Dead’, ‘A game of chess’, ‘The fire
sermon’, ‘death by water’ and ‘What the Thunder said’. It includes Eliot’s own notes which explain some of
his many allusions, quotations and half-quotations. The common theme which links the different parts of
‘The waste Land’ is the decay and fragmentation of western culture. The various cultural fragments which
the poet pieces together are selected from an incredibly wide range of sources. Eliot’s major sources are in
some respects similar to Joyce’s in Ulysses. The bible and Dante’s Divina Commedia are of vital importance
to Eliot, but so too Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Verlaine, Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the
Hindu sacred text ‘The Upanishads’ and the works of anthropologists like James Frazer, whose ‘The golden
Bough’ was one of Eliot’s major sources for information on ancient civilizations and rites.

Eliot compares the modern phenomenon of cultural fragmentation to a heap of broken images and he
contrasts this with a barely remembered mythical past whose legends and myth still contained a sense of
moral and spiritual wholeness. Among the legends alluded to are those of the Holy Grail and the Fisher
King, along with ancient rites and festivities celebrating fertility and the rebirth of nature, which Eliot
learned of from his readings of Frazer and other anthropologist. The Waste Land alludes to the opposition
between the sterility of the modern world and the fertility of the past, but this opposition is never simple.
According to Eliot in the modern world these images are broken and we cannot reach or experience their
original meaning anymore and he seeks or discovers correspondences between the disparate cultural
fragments that structure his poem. He believes that in the modern world, culture has been made banal and
no longer teaches us anything. Eliot uses his own cultural fragments to demonstrate his idea by ironically
inserting them into scenes of ordinary modern life. The resulting juxtapositions serve to highlight the
dimension of lost meanings which still lie, invisibly, behind a world that has forgotten them. The Waste Land
is also highly innovative in its use of language. The poem creates sharp juxtapositions between different
registers of speech, from the highly rhetorical to the colloquial language of ordinary Londoners. Like Joyce’s
Ulysses its vocabulary is made up of words from several different languages. It includes passages of great
lyricism and also some prophetic passages reminiscent of Blake’s visionary poems about London.

 The Burial of the dead  which focuses on the opposition between fertility and sterility, life and
death.

 A game of chess  This section focuses on two opposing scenes, one of high society and one of
the lower classes. The first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed woman
surrounded by exquisite furnishings. The second part of this section shifts to a London barroom,
where two women discuss a third woman.

 The Fire Sermon  The third section of The Waste Land is called the Fire Sermon, which is
something a Buddhist councils his followers to conceive an aversion for the burning flames of
passion and physical sensation, and thus live a holy life, attain freedom from earthly things, and
finally leave the cycle of rebirth for Nirvans. This section is about LUST vs. LOVE.  is the section
where Eliot makes the degrading effects of mechanization most apparent.

 Death by water  The shortest section of the poem, “Death by Water” describes a man,
Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning. In death he has forgotten his
worldly cares as the creatures of the sea have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his reader
to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own mortality.

 What the Thunder Said  The final section of the Waste Land is about hope and resurrection.
In the first paragraph there is an allusion to a Garden – Gethsemane – the garden that Jesus was
in when the Roman soldiers took him away to be crucified. This refers from the time before he
was crucified to after it. The next few paragraph backs up idea of wasteland and the title of the
entire poem. The final stanza of the poem has Italian which alludes to Dante’s inferno.