Eliot also argues in that essay that a new poet joins the poetic tradition by both being different from what has gone before, but also by suggesting a sense of continuum with the past. (‘ I wandered lonely as a cloud’, and so on.) See Eliot’s 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ for more on this. This is a very anti-romantic position, going against the likes of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who put the self, the idea of ‘I’, at the centre of poetry. Good poetry, for Eliot, is impersonal: it’s not all about the poet’s own feelings and experiences. How should we interpret these? The poem’s use of allusion can be linked to something Eliot championed in poetry, which is the idea of impersonality. The literary allusions raise all sorts of questions about The Waste Land as a work of poetry itself. But how can we fix this society? By regaining spiritual and psychological enlightenment and making peace with our demons. Even the living seem to be suffering from some kind of spiritual wound. This is the modern world: civilisation has been reduced to a ‘waste land’ and the land has lost its fertility and ability to bring forth life. Only the arrival of a pure-hearted stranger … permits the land to become fertile again. The Fisher King is impotent, his lands infertile and drought-stricken one cause of this infertility is a crime, the rape of some maidens in the king’s court. The Fisher King myth, which helps to explain so much of the poem’s imagery and themes, is summed up by Pericles Lewis on Yale’s Modernisms site: the Fisher King) and various other religious and literary traditions. He probably borrowed this idea from James Joyce, who had used it in his novel Ulysses, which was published in book form in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land, but which had been appearing in instalments in the Little Review for several years prior to that.Įliot wrote an essay in praise of Joyce’s use of ancient myth, and borrowed this for his own poem – drawing on Arthurian legend (e.g.

In addition to this, there is what is called the ‘mythic method’: Eliot’s use of a mythic narrative or structure. Eliot’s poem draws on a vast number of literary and religious texts and traditions. But Eliot’s poem took the techniques of modernism to new heights.Ī good place to start with an analysis of The Waste Land is to examine the importance of literary allusion.

In 1919, a British female poet named Hope Mirrlees wrote a remarkable avant-garde poem, Paris: A Poem, which was published a year later by the Woolfs’ Hogarth press and anticipated Eliot’s poem in startling ways. Eliot’s wasn’t the first long modernist poem written about the War: an intriguing poem by Ford Madox Ford, ‘Antwerp’, had been written in 1915 and was a poem that Eliot himself admired.

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