Eliot’s Waste Land- An Internal or External Place?

As a modernist writer, T.S. Eliot employed a poetic collage of allusions and voices to represent the fragmentation of the place and time in which he lived and wrote. Many lines and references in his poem allude to the ruin of the European continent as a result of the trauma of World War I. While we might assume that the poet depicted conditions in society at that tumultuous time, we must also consider that Eliot’s particular psyche, with its own stresses and frustrations, was also significantly affected by those very conditions. He was not merely reflecting the external conditions, but he was experiencing an internal waste land as well, one in which he could no longer cope, ultimately leading to his nervous breakdown.

On a physical plain, the land was explicitly destroyed by the violence and death of war; the bombings, movement of troops, and trench warfare all rendered the land a waste. Plant life was killed and cities were ruined, and the waste and wreckage, The river sweats/ Oil and tar, were carried out to the sea. Many references are made to the dead and bones- Lilacs out of the dead land and …rats’ alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones. The great number of young men killed in the war, I had not thought death had undone so many, are now buried in this same waste land. That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Has the soil been poisoned, rendered infertile, or will it revive again? April, a time traditionally associated with rebirth and resurrection, is unpromisingly called the cruellest month.

In a social sense, Eliot also portrayed a waste land, one of decadence and infertility in relationships. His characters are sexually dysfunctional or frustrated from meaningless, impersonal, and unproductive encounters between the sexes. A hermaphroditic bisexual, Tiresias…is... throbbing between two lives,/ Old man with wrinkled female breasts, symbolic of the impossibility of normal relations and reproduction. The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king/ So rudely forced alludes to the pain of a rape scene. The squalor and decay of debased marriage is evident in the pleading with Lil before Albert’s imminent return to make yourself a bit smart…To get yourself some teeth…For sure he wants a good time,/ And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will. Albert’s infidelity is matched only by Lil’s in her adulterous relations and abortions.

The montage of these various images and dialogues may be representative not only of the poet’s external world, but may implicitly refer to Eliot’s fragmented mind through which all his previous literary knowledge streamed. The fact that bombs were literally falling on London as fragments of this poem were being written must have taken its toll on his fragile sanity. In addition to this physical situation, Eliot also suffered sexual and emotional fears as a homosexual in a marriage with a wife who also had a nervous breakdown. The stress of their failure to have children, a natural expectation from a marriage, is perhaps reflected in the lines Murmur of maternal lamentation… And bats with baby faces as well as the query, What you get married for if you don’t want/ children?

Suffering from mental exhaustion, Eliot traveled to the beach where On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing. At the lowest point in his mental state when he went to Switzerland for treatment, Eliot wrote By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept. In his attempt to make those aforementioned connections in this most trying time in his life, the juxtaposition of traditional texts from the Bible and Buddhist stories to plays of Shakespeare and libretti of opera demonstrated a personal and cultural fragmentation through which he desired to make order out of his external and internal chaos. These fragments I have shored against my ruins… Shantih shantih shantih are a more positive reflection and expectation, ending in almost a prayer-like fashion. It signals the hope that he emerged from the torture of this waste land by way of the insight and spiritual redemption he experienced through “the peace which passeth understanding” in these texts.