CHAPTER I1

The Waste Land: A Retrospective Evaluation

T.S. Eliot referred to a long poem he wanted to write

in two letters he wrote during 1919. The first was a

letter dated fifth November 1919 addressed to John Quinn the

wealthy New York banker, whose generous patronage and help

Eliot had sought on several occasions. In this letter Eliot

mentioned "a poem I have in mind." Late in December during

the same year, referring casually to his new year

resolutions, Eliot wrote to his mother about his desire "to

write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time."

Having been preoccupied with the preparation of the

press-draft of The Sacred Wood, Eliot cowld not turn to the

long poem during 1920. By May 1921, Eliot informed John

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

visit of Eliot's highly temperamental mother to her

sensitive son and his impulsive wife later in the year may

be sufficient biographical reasons for his three months'

leave from Lloyds, and subsequent psychic treatment and

convalescence at Margate in October, and later at Lausanne

in November. Setting aside these extrinsic personal

details and their hypothetical influence on the creative

mind of the poet we have to turn to a letter dated twenty /

J first February 1922 from Ezra Pound to John Quinn which read:

"Eliot came back from his Lausanne specialist looking 0.K;

and with a damn good poem (19 pages) in his suitcase; same

finished up here. ,, 4

With a lot of admirable critical acumen and creative

insight, Pound started pruning the poem mercilessly i F

eliminating the superfluities until it - ran from April to i \ . shantih without break. In a self-congratulatory squib

T -. /* - i' composed after his editorial endeavours, he addressed

himself as Eliot's manimidwife, and. this claim was

gratefully endorsed by Eliot in his letters and interviews

in the years after the publication of the poem. All

controversies related to the original manuscript and Pound's

subsequent deletions and improvisations, subsided only after

Faber and Faber published in 1971 the facsimile and

transcript of the original draft with Pound's annotations

released by the New York Public Library which had purchased

the mss. from T.F Conroy, John Quinn's niece, way back

in 1958. Valerie Eliot's explanatory introduction, and the

text of the 1922 edition of The Waste Land were the added

attractions of the Faber edition. The rest of the

publication details could be summed up as follows:

However it was with the finished product that the

early reviewers of The Waste Land were concerned

and The Waste Land appeared in its present shape

almost simultaneously in the Criterion and in the , Dial, without the dedication to Pound and also - without the notes. The poem appeared as a book on

15 December, 1922, published by Boni and Liveright /'

in an edition of 1000 copies, with the notes, an

appendage constructed only for the purpose of

adding to the length of an otherwise slim text. A

second impression was published early in 1923,

with a further 1000 copies printed. The first

English /edition appeared on 12 September, 1923.

About 460 copies were hand-printed by Leonard and

Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. 6

Any retrospective evaluation of the mixed response that

the poem evoked among the early reviewers and critics should

bring into purview the impact that the literary cubists

like Pound and Eliot had already made on the otherwise /

serene sensibility of the Georgians. Their esoteric verse

such as "Prufrock", "The Boston Evening Transcript", "Aunt

Helen" and "cousin Nancy", which was slowly filtering into ;',.

Poetry, Quarterly Review, and the aathoia Antholog1 in the

two years preceding the publication of Prufrock and Other

Observations by the Egoist Press in June 1917, was visibly

disturbing the Georgian repose of reviewers like Arthur

/" Waugh, against whom Pound had to be formidably in the 4~-

defensive in his articles in the Egoist in June 1917, and

subsequently in Poetry in August 1917. In these articles,

Pound highlighted the nexus between social and literary

values as a major motif in the poetic idiom of the day as

/ against the rotten corporate flavour and group &nerisms of 7

the Georgians. He defended Eliot's poetry as encoding

multiple cult6ral strains such as the best pin Ovid and

Theocritus on the one hand, and the sixteenth,'century

English literature and the twentieth century, French

literature on the other. Pound derided people like Waugh as

symptoms of a decadent and rotten civilisation and

sensibility, and fixed Eliot's lineage in the tradition of

the best poetry in Europe, either spoken or written,

irrespective of ethnic, linguistic or geographical barriers.

How far these observations influenced Eliot's theoretical

perspectives on tradition and individual performance of

creative writers is a different question to be discussed

elsewhere. I

What was decadent and rotten in the socio-cultural

ethos of the decade as making the emergence of a modernist

poetic idiom inevitable has been beautifully summed up by

Michel Roberts in his introduction to the 1936 edition of

The Faber Book of Modern Verse with striking contemporaneity

and insight:

Every vital age, perhaps sees its own time as

crucial and full of perils, but the problems and

difficulties of our own age necessarily appear

more urgent to us than those of any other, and the

i need for an evaluating and clarifying poetry than

it appears to be today. Industrial changes have

broken up the old culture based on an agricultural

/ 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 publi~ation.~ 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

/ / d smoke-screen for pundits, pedants and clairv yants to

1%

Arsevere at them. The extreme sophistication of t

Eliot's

poetic personality appeared quite embarrassing to the

reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement of twentieth

September 1923. l1 The expression of whatever emotions he

wanted to evoke in the reader was achieved through a

deliberate zig-zagging of esoteric allusions. The

fragmentarinesd of the poetic structure oscillates between

reticence andleloquence, and the echoes of the suggestive " hints can be etched only by the exceptional scholar. Eliot

/ exerted the maximum strain on the expressibility of the

medium at the risk of 'being incoherent. But the reviewer

could perceive that The Waste Land was an ambitious poetic

j experiment. Clive Bell in a review in the Nation and

Athenaeum pointed out the deliberate avoidance of

, imagination in the composition of the poetic lines, and N.P Dawson in his commentary in the Forum very sarcastically

/' derided the poem as a dirge on American prohibition, as the

poet's only longing was for a bottle of rum. l2 The

Christian Sclence Monitor, The New York Herald Tribune and

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

writing good blank verse in the blessed moments of poetic

inspiration but ridiculed the practice of reading a poem

with the help of footnotes given by the poet himself. He

said : "But a poem that has to be explained in notes is not

unlike a picture with 'This is a dog' inscribed beneath. ,,13

In the mess of serious and curious commentaries and

reviews that the poem evoked soon after its publication, the

first ever realistic evalution came along with the

/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

drought that contemporary Europe was undergoing became a - trend-setter in the world of poetic criticism. l4 ~ilson

pointed out the clarity of the underlying emotional

compulsions of the poetic segments of the The Waste Land,

and praised the fragmentariness of the poem as a thematic

and formal inevitability. His daring contrastive evaluation

of the lines of The Waste Land and the bewildering poetic <

mosaic of the lines from Pound's Cantos, hailing Eliot as a

better poet of the two, called for Eliot's personal

intervention with the comment : "I sincerely consider Ezra /

Pound the most important living poet in the English

language. ,, 15

In Science and Poetry (1926) 1.A Richards, then a

Cambridge lecturer in English, dwelt briefly on the

questions of content and technique in The Waste Land. He .' could identify the sense of desolation that the poem

expressed as revealing of the sensibility of the age, and

the obscurity that the poem was alleged to have as an

inevitable aspect of the modernist idiom. As regards the

question of fragmentariness, 1.A Richards pointed out that

it was a part of the form that the poem was conceived in, i

and it was the duty of the reader to recreate a unified

response within the intellectual and rational schemes

operating in the composition. Though a coherent

intellectual thread to string the different ltems of - The

Waste Land may be missing, the accord, contrast and

interaction of the emotional effects are effective devices

for achieving an emotional cohesion. Richards refuted

Middleton Murry's view that Eliot's technique evoked

unnecessary insecurity and intellectual suspicion against '

all canons of good writing, citing the problem of Hamlet as 1

the most provocative thematic and formalistic puzzle. Any

original poem, he argued, far from evoking a connotative

emotional appeal, should compel the mind that receives it to

grow along different and subtle lines of thinking and

feeling. As for the question of the footnotes, Richards

noticed a tiresome'brevity defeating the very prupose, but

appreciated the indispensability that the notes meant to the

uninitiated reader.

In his analysis of the technique of T.S Eliot, Richards

noticed the significance of repetition of the same

linguistic or textual component in varied and drifting

contexts, each time evoking a different semantic experience.

He summed up his evaluation of the technique of the poem as

creating a "music of ideas", ideas which are concrete and

abstract, general and particular. The poem in total effect

contained a coherent whole of feeling and attitude, and

produced a peculiar liberation of the will. The

comprehensiveness of Richardauiews is amply revealed in

the following lines:

There are those who think that he merely takes his

readers into The Waste Land and leaves them there,

that in his last poem he confesses his impotence

to release the healing waters. The reply is that

some readers find in his poetry not only a

clearer, fuller realisation of their plight, the

plight of a whole generation, than they find

elsewhere, but also through the very energies set

free in that realisation a return of the saving

passion. 16

In one of the appendices attached to the extended

edition of the Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards

ccJnsoLidated hi.s views on The Waste Land with remarkable <

ingenuity so that Empson, Kichardr$//pupil at Cambridge could

use 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 ChessUin The

Waste Land have been analysed by 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

l i light.

Some early impressionistic critical perspectives on

Eliot's verse in general and The Waste Land in particular

have prevailed over several decades of perceptive academic

study and analysis of Eliot's poetic achievements. For

example Richard ~ldington, in his study of post-war

literature had sought a comparison between Joyce's prose and

Eliot's verse and found that both were equivalents in their /'

originality. E.M. Forster in an article written in 1928 and

later collected in Abinqer Harvest had found the idiom of

the post-war generation in The Waste Land, very much as the

/idiom of 1900 was within the literary models of George

Meredith. Forster considered Eliot the most important

author of the day, and the resourceful provider of the

intellectual food that the generation very much required.

When Forster wrote this, Eliot had barely reached the age of

forty, and this testimony was an affirmation of the genius

of the youny man. Edwin Muir found Eliot's "dissociation of

sensibility" a viable literary contention as far as the

developments in English poetry from the seventeenth century

were concerned, though he expressed his reservations with

regard to Eliot's views on Milton and the Romantics. But

Muir considered Eliot as the powerful spokesman of the

intelligent people of the day, and adjudged him as the most

pccornplished and complete writer of the generation. Gilbert

Seldes, Bonamy Dobree, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves were

among those who extolled the virtues of The Waste Land

towards the end of the decade as a pioneer ng experiment. I The thirties witnessed a resurgent academic interest in

The Waste Land. For the first time erudition was making its

preponderant impact on an esoteric poem, and the inevitable

resuLt was a conditioned response that influenced

generations of academics. In the third chapter of - New

Bearings in English Poetry ( 1 9 3 2 ) , F.R. Levis dwelt on the

minority culture that the poem represented in a world that

miserably suffered from the breakdown of a cultural

consciousness. The breach of continuity and the consequent

uprooting of life that the machine age brought about as an

inevitable consequence required a new metaphor and idiom for

self--expression, and The Waste Land represented all these.

Leavis refer-red to I.A. Richard'.:) theory of the music of

ideais in The Waste Land and expressed his impressions in

almoist identical critical approximations such as "rich

disocganisation" and "depth of orchestration". These

qualifying adjectives in the ultimate analysis coalescedinto

I the "inclusive consciousness" that was central to the

unity of the poem. Though the poem was an expression of

erudition, he thought that it best expressed the scientific

spirit of the age. l8 Leavis argued that the poem could

comrr~unicate even without the aid of notes after an analysis

of "The Burial of the Dead", though this communication was

aimed at a limited audience through a unique

fragmentariness. For a generation that was uprooted from

the soil on the one hand, and from the immemorial ways of

life on the other, the breach of continuity in expression

was inevitable in life and art and The Waste Land was the

representatlve symbol of the times. l9 The cumulative impact

of Leavis's evaluation of the poem was not far to seek, as

all later scholastic evaluations were obviously tinged by

/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~teristic of 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'

defensive to project his own image as the apostle of modern

art to an unappreciative world. Matthiessen, on the other

hand, opted for a balanced and credible perspective in his

analysis of the unity in the fragmentariness of The Waste

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

reader meet on common ground. In Ulysscs, Joyce gave

literary expression to such a simultaneity of experience

ingeniously combining the myth and other levels of psychic

realism. When he does so in a quarter of a million words,

Eliot optecl for a rnore compact format of four hundred and

odd lines to achieve the same end.

The apparent fragmentariness of The Waste Land is a

/ camouflage that conceals the throbbing unity of an intense

experience underneath. It cuts across cultural climates and

linguistic barriers. The distinction between myth and

ritual, anthropology and clairvoyance, bookish scholarship

and sensual experience melts and merges into a new poetic

texture. His words are worth quoting:

The problem for the artist is to discover some

unified pattern in this variety; and yet, if he

believes as Eliot does that poetry should embody a

man's reaction to his whole experience, also to

present the full sense of its complexity. He can

accomplish this double task of accurately

recording what he has felt and perceived, and at

the sametime interpreting it, only if he grasps

the similarity that often lies beneath contrasting

appearances, and can thus emphasise the essential

equivalence of seemingly different experiences.

Such understanding and resultant emphasis

constitute Eliot's chief reason for introducing so

many reminiscences of other poets into the texture

of his own verse. 2 0

'Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance gave Eliot an

anthropological framework upon which he could weave his

i . n t r i ~ : d t e pi)et.ic material. It amounts to a total misreading

of 'The Waste Land if we dig out the Grail legend as a unique - structual device used by the poet. The reason is that in a

single myth the poem encodes a string of other myths

cohering themselves into a unified whole. In a single

reference, the nexus between the vegetation myth and the

rebirth of the year, the fertility myth and the rebirth of

potency, the Christian myth of Christ's death and

resurrection comes alive in a mosaic of suggestive meaning.

On th,? psychological plane the mythical symbols such as the

grail and the lance reveal sexual symbolism and religious

and ritualistic significance as springing from the same

well-springs of Orpheus cults and the Grail legend. 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. "" He explicated this point with reference

to the use of myth by Joyce in Ulysses. Matthiessen points

out that Eliot is using the same mythical device in The - Waste Land in order to create contrasting levels of

experience. Whereas Joyce used the mythical device for

expanding the creative expression, Eliot applied the same

for compressing his poem. 2 2

The Waste Land has been defined as a realistic picture

of the "immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is

contemporary history. , , 2 3 The question of social

disint.egration as is reflected in The Cdaste Land gives a

personal plane to the poetic experience. Matthiessen is of

the view that at the level of physical experience, the poem

is essentially sensual, as any creative work cannot but be /

so. The intellectual control and manipulation may regulate

the content, but the personal experience of the poet as a

compelling force of self expression prevails.

3.s to questions related to obscurity and erudition,

Matthiessen compares Eliot to Landor and Donne, who due to

their esoteric qualities as poets had appealed only to a

limited audience. Nevertheless, they had never been

stigmatised on that score. And no one could think of

quarrelling with Lucretius for not reaching a "popular

level," he argues. 2 4 The lack of spontaneity in The Waste

Land is not the result of defective craftsmanship and .- / strained poetic expression. Instead, Eliot's poetic style

is as cultivated and refined as that of Chaucer, who is

considered one of the greatest narrative poets of all times.

If connectives are missing and lines are ending abruptly in

The Waste Land, it has been formally deslgned to be so. It

is the content that has mostly dictated the form.

The perfect balance that prominently prevails upon

Flatthiessen's judgement is revealed in the following remark:

Certainly some of the analogies with musical

structure, in particular the summation of the

themes in the broken ending of the final part,

have always seemed to me somewhat forced and

overtheoretical. But this is very different from

sayiny that he is a too conscious artist. Indeed

such a charge would overlook the fact that some of

the poetry of the past which across the remove of

time seems most 'spontaneous,' that of Chaucer,

for example, was actually a product of long

experimentation in poetic theory fully as

calculated as Eliot's. 2 5

For Joyce and Eliot, erudition was a scaffold that gave

viable support to the creative release of energy that gave

shape to the conciousness and sensibility expressed in

Ulysses and in The Waste Land. The framework of the

Odyssey, one of the best stories in Western civilisation,

was the choicest design for the fictional corpus that

intricately wove out the correspondences between sensations,

emotions, memories and thoughts on the one hand, and

colours, arts, objects, bodily organs, odours and rhythms on

the other in Ulysses. The Waste Land has been scaffolded on

myths so as to make the poetic materiel shape itself into

its own natural structure mixing reading and experience,

emotion and thought, and individual and broad humanitarian

dimensions. In the ultimate effect, Matthiessen's academic \j 0 C I I ' ' evalutions 'confirmed the greatness of The Waste Land as the 77- d--

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 ~ - ~ ~ n t mep movement; - ~ ' ImayEs l l ~ e . r r r ~ m a ~ ~ m n

.. three :itaves," "the one-eyed merchant" and "the crowds of

. . . - . . .. - -

movements of The Waste Land following the example of the

academic analysis of F.R Leavis and F.0 Matthiessen, Cleanth

Brooks concludes

that Pre is cxccptional poetic

craftsmanship and structura cohesion in the poem. Pointing

out the errors in the judgement of able critics like Edmund 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

identifies three broad categories of ironical parallelisms

in the poem, which are contrastive, contextual, and

contextualised in their connotative aspects. Sometimes,

these coalesce into a totality of poetic experience, as is

happening in "The Burial of the Dead." On the surface, this

section brings the patter of the charlatan Madame Sosostris

with an obvious irony. This arises from the contrast

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

people walkirig round in a ring" could be contextualised so

as to become central symbols of the poem according to

Cleanth Brooks:

To sum up, all the central symbols of the poem

head up here; but here, in the only section in

which they are explicitly bound together, the

binding is slight and accidental. The deeper

lines of association only emerge in terms of the

total context as the poem develops--and this is,

of course, exactly the effect which the poet

intends. 2 7

This kind of transference and associative value of

meaning in unexpected poetic contexts appear as a consistent

/ poetic device used by the poet throughout The Waste Land.

Sometimes the effect is violent as is the case with the

literary allusion to "the change of Philomel." At first, the

innocent context in which the allusion occurs is in the

decorative details in the room in the opening lines of "A

Game of Chess." But the violent contextualisation in the

deliberate change of tense in the line, "And still she

cried, and still the world pursues" makes the literary

allusion a powerful symbol of the moral degradation of the

modern world. The parallelisms among Dante's Hell, the

waste land in the Grail legend, and Baudelaire's Paris

undergo the same process of tranference and

contextualisation. Death by drowning in The Tempest gets

contextualised in the subtle parallelism between the

reger~erating death of the fertility god of Frazer and the

drowr.ed Phoenician sailor of the Tarot cards. From the

ironic mockery of an established death symbol being

contrasted with the degraded symbol of vulgar clairvoyance,

the contextualisation shifts to higher and sublime levels of

regeneration, fertility arid growth. Here is an instance

where the transference of a symbol is made for a positive

and negative impact as required by the principle of

comp.lexity as explained by Cleanth Brooks. He points out

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

that would just have been a dramatised version of a didactic

theme, and inevitably a thinner and less honest poem. In

other words, far from being a controversial poetic strategy,

the apparent structural incoherence of the poem is a violent

/and radical poetic necessity used for rehabilitating a

system of beliefs known but discredited over the years of

modernisation and material progress. Dante had to encode a

system of accepted beliefs in his Divine Comedy: Spenser had

to project a new system of beliefs in his Faerie Queene; but

Eliot's mission was the rehabilitation of a discredited

value system. The structure and content of Eliot's poetic

statement could not but cohere into a fundamental reality

through confusion and cynicism, and not in spite of them.

4- 'Phe runlulati~vc? impact of academic criticism launched by

Leavis , Matthiessen and generally dealing

/

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 PB

sequences of small poems which severally express the ruin of

post-war Europe, the poet's ill-health and irritating /

s e r ~ ~ t u d e to 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

highly straticied society in such sections like "A Game of

Chess" make to exquisite craftsmanship. The Cleopatra like

woman who sits in a burnished throne on the chess board is

the queen, and Lil and Albert who move around as petty pawns

in a futile game of uncertain survival are the brutal

philosophic abstractions of the disillusioned contemporary

world. Hugh Kenner traces the narratological puzzle central

to The Waste Land to the delicate phenomenology of Francis

Herbert Bradley. As regards the subtle philosophic

correlations between the perceiver and the perceived, he

makes the following observation: /

The perceiver is describable only as the zone of /

consciousness where that which he perceives can : k

coexist; but the perceived conversely, can't be -. i Q*.)

accorded independent status; it is precisely, all Yl5i $ -r

that can coexlst In thls particular zone of

2 8 : , . . \ i consciousness. . . . . . . . j; .*

The apparent heterogeneity and discord in the several

poetic sequences of The Waste Land can be explained only in

terms of the impressions the perceived reality could make in

the consciousness of the perceiver namely Tiresias, who is

none other- I:Iii?n the poet himself.

Academlc criticism carried to extremely subtle

/

source-hunting has resulted in artificially imposing a

rational structure on the poem as a forbidding iron frame.

An example in view is Grover Smith's study of the sources

and meaning of The Waste Land in T.S.Eliot1s Poetry and

Plays ( 1 9 5 6 ) . The compulsions of a unified narrative

structure is sure to hamper the poetic merits of The Waste

Land and Grover Smith has struggled hard to wrestle with the - lines so as to bring out the sequences as the memories of

the c'mnipresent central conciousness of Tiresias. The

il.logicalities and confusions resulting from such an effort

would adversely affect the critical perspectives of the

period, though it would temporarily settle the class room

question, "What does this mean?." Smith's theory that the

cock is crowing in Portuguese and that the carbuncular young

man is the quester himself2' verges on the ridiculous. A

Helen Gardner in an Oxford lecture in March 1972 -- ,/' I *? * :,: confirmed her earlier stand that the poem had a central

I / . stasis whlch cannot be overcome by any narratological or

1. interpretative enterprise. It is a Purgatorio looking ) 4- - ,

forward to an inferno. -- 1.

30 In her 1972 lecture she confirmed &--

her earlier argument that even before being edited by Pound,

The Waste Lan t i hacl a fragmentary structure, violently

juxtaposing contrasting styles, episodes, images, allusions,

1nemori.e2 and echoes from the writings of ancient and

conteinporary authors. But the themes of sterility,

disordered desire, and impotent longing linger as central to

the poem, and the title of the poem in effect is its sum. 3 1

The decades after the thirties also witnessed the

//iconoclastic fervour of critics like Yvor Winters who were

unconpromisinij on the false /erudition and confusing p(3 structural disorders of The Waste Land. In On Modern Poets -'id$

t'

r' ( 1 9 4 3 ) Winters made a frontal attack on the poem alleging y ; * , -

/ , ' I

that it was the journalistic reproduction of debased & material. Making a thematic comparison between The Waste

p.Ipl: ' '6

Land and Les Fleurs du Mal, he pointed out that Eliot sought - his form in debased and stupid matter, whereas Baudelaire

could endow eternal verity upon a similar theme. Pound also

has borrowed extensively, but with discernible consistency

he has reworked on the borrowed material giving a better

metrical uniformity and coherence to The Cantos. The

borrowed material in The Waste Land has been seldom reworked

as could be illustrated by the last eight lines which

reproduce unaltered passages from seven sources. Such

fragrnentarincss seldom caters for any modernist sensibility

and can at best be considered the outcome of poor judgement

atid a lot of exhibitive scholarship.

Karl Shapiro in The Death of Literary Judgement (1.960)

call~ed The Waste Land the biggest literary hoaxiof the

century whuse critical success was carefully planned and

exncuted. L i k e 'The Cantos of Pound, the poem instantly

became the sacredcow of modern poetry, though the form of

the poem could not inspire a single poet any time after its

. ' < , i ' ..

.;? . 4

< r 6 8

W'publication to venture on a similar project. Even Eliot

changed his track and style. According to Shapiro, whatever

beauty can be found in the poem lies in the interspersed

tonal effects and drama of the poem. When its rhetoric

switches f rorn description to exclamation, and from

interrogation to expletives, the effect is boredom. But I

when the VictoriaJnarrative emerges from the structural

gimmicks like brokenness, subtitling and mixing of borrowed

passages, there is poetic appeal and interest. The poem

F' cannot but exist as a literary curiosity not because of any

inherent merit, but because of the critical reputation it

could accumulate over the years due to its oddities.

In Imaqe and Experience, (1960) Graham Houqh remarked:

A modern and highly individual elegiac intensity,

pastiche Kenaissance grandeur, sharp antithetical

social Comment in the Augustan manner, the low

mimetic of public-house conversation--all these

and probably several other styles are found side

by side. The relation of these is sometimes

obvious; it is one of calculated contrast. But it

1 s d questlon how hard such contrasts of texture

cdr~ be worked in a relatively short poem without

dl5astrous damage to the unlty of surface. 3 2

But the calculated shock resulting from contrasts has

only limited effect according to Graham Hough.

Nevertheless, there is a unity in the poem bringing out the

subtle use of the stream of consciousness technique

enmeshing a wide collocation of images and personae evoking

an abstract sense of connection. The essential technique

adopted by Eliot is presenting images in a focus and

perspective with calculated precision.

In an article entitled "The Defeatism of The Waste

Land ' published in the Critical Quarterly in 1960, David

Craig made a frontal attack on Leavis's position that The /

Waste Land was an impersonal portrait of a decadent society.

His point of argument was that the poem was the product of a

I' defeatist personal depression, and its possibly

unant~cipated effect was the inculcation of a superior

cynicism w h i c h flattered the young men to believe that they

/ ; were the sole bearers of a fine culture spurned and spoiled

by mass barbarians. He corroborates this point of view

citlng Eliot's comment that in many readers, The Waste Land

created the illusion that they were disillusioned. The

concept of a personal defeatist streak in the poem was

worked out tr) Ludicrous extremes by writers like John Peter

who attributed a personal revulsion from normal sexual

relations on the part of Eliot. This unwelcome contention

reiated to the poet's personal life appeared in Craig's

Essays in Crltscism (19521.

In an enlightening commentary on the pursuit of logical

coherence in The Waste Land by scholarly critics like

Leavis, Maxwell and Matthiessen in The New Poetic, C.K.

Stead argued in favour of the direct poetic experience of

the poem. In spite of the assiduous dissective logic /

applied on the poem over decades of scholastic criticism,

there is still something personally appreciable and

appealing in the poet-reader interaction in The Waste Land.

This aspect of course is more emotive than referential, and

is worth experiencing.

Perhaps the climactic effect of the concept of personal

experience could be seen in the trend-setting essay on the

"Bahylonish Dialect" of The Waste Land by Frank Kermode in d'

T.S Eliot: 'l'tle Mar! and His Work. Kermode treads on a

commendably unconventional path in evaluating the poem as

the "traditisn of the new" in theme and form. He evaluates

the poetic concepts of Eliot in the light of the perceptive

contradictions of schismatic traditionalism, romantic

classicism and a highly personal impersonality, reflected in

Eliot's poetic practice. The essential perplexity and

confusion that is central to the awareness of a poetic

spirlt that is set to explore the frontiers of the

tiistempers the time could not but be expressed through

contradictions. The irregularity of expression and the

illogicality in the assortment of themes should thus be

related tc) the rough "rag and bone-shop" poetry that the age

deserved. 'The ceaseless effort at self-ef facement that the

poet makes Ln The Waste Land as a part of his theory of

impersonality results in a decreation that defies the poetic

form and content of traditional poetry. Decreation is a \

deliberate repudiation of what is already internalised by I ,"' the poet and the reader as part of the English poetic

tradition and an impersonalised and unconventional

recreation of a naked poetic stuff which defies any easy

categorisation. On the plane of personal experience, the

poem is meant to defy and resist all forms of logical or I*

presumptive preconceptions. It is a modernist epic coming , 1

over to us as a unique sample of new poetry emerging over

four decades of historical development in the English poetic

tradition. Kermode sums up his argument in the following

lines:

Thls is not the way the poem is read nowadays; but

most people who know about poetry will still admit

that it is a very difficult poem, though it

invites glib or simplified interpretation. As I

said, one can think of it as a mere arbitrary

sequence upon which we have been persuaded to

impose an order. But the true order, I think, is

C h 6 . r - c to be found, unique, unrepeated, resistant

to synthesis. 3 3

Faber a r ~ d Faber brought out Collected Poems 1909-1962

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 ~allarmg, from which a poetic

consciousness, and a sense of narrative events erupted in

t:he mind of the reader. In other words, Eliot always opted J

fror an extreme foregrounding of language as an end in

itself, and as a result, his poetic influence could only be

transitory. Eliot's death on fourth January 1965 gave a new

impetus to the academic evaluations of his achievements

after a short respite during his ailing years, 1962-65. - The

- Times spoke of Eliot's modernist sensibility in glowing di

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

Theatre by Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield and George Devine

marked the resuscitated enthusiasm in the man and his work.

Along with this came the repeated exhortation of Pound to

the readers to read Eliot again. The columnists of New

Statesman placed Eliot on a par with Dryden, Johnson, -

Coleridge and Ar-nold as the representative authorities of

their respective literary ages, attributing to Eliot the

unique leadership of literary modernism. Attempts to

evaluatt: Eliot's poetry as a spiritual autobiography was

augmented by supportive writings by Hugh Kenner,

I.A.Richards, Herbert Read, Stephen Spender, Bonamy Dobree,

Robert Espeaight, Frank Morley and E. Martin Browne. 3 4 1n

summer 1965, Leonard Unger published T.S. Eliot: A Selected

Critique which contained an important collection of articles

on Eliot's poems and plays. The "Dantesque Voice" of the /

doyen of modern poetry reverberated through T.S. Eliot: The

Man and His Work edited by Allen Tate and published in

England in 1967. .#

i-'

The seventies began with the tone of renouncing Eliot's

contributions to the modernist sensibility, very much in the

line of William Carlos Williams who had attacked Eliot in /

the twenties as his poetic contemporary. In 1972, Charles

Tomlinson pointed out the antithetical views of Eliot and

Williams on the nature of objective reality, concluding the

treatise on the premise that Eliot's poetry marked an "end"

8 'i in itself, whereas Williams had initiated a "beginning."

Robert Greley and Duncan rejected Eliot as a poetic model. 3 5 C Y

~ l i o t 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.

Eliot's Intellectual Development: 1922-1939 (1972), are

memorable attempts at biographical criticism. The latter

work is an instructive guide to Eliot's milieu, social,

political and cultural. H. Miller in his Poets of Reality

(1966) tried to evaluate Eliot in the midst of his poetic

contemporaries, and F.R. Leavis continued with his /

rethinking of Eliot in The Living Principle (1975),

ultimately asserting that the best parts of Four Quartets

were the best in Eliot's poetry.

In Eliot in Perspective edited by Graham Martin, the

contributors included F.W. Bateson, Donald Davie, Ian Gregor #-

and Terry Eagleton. Davie also contributed to the anthology

The Waste Land in Different Voices (1974) edited by A.D.

Moody. Peter Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture evaluated

Roche, Ashbury, J.H. Brynne and others as against Eliot and

Joyce in the light of the pesthetic theories of Lacan and v'

Derrida. 36 A.D. Moody's book Thomas Stearns Eliot (1979)

stressed the need for an elucidatory approach to Eliot's

poetry, as it contained something like the sacred mystery of k

the scriptural verses.

The eighties and nineties might be rightly ldelled the

d decades of academic efflorescence in Eliot criticism,

transcending lihguistic, geographical and cultural barriers

and making E:liot bibliography an unwieldy and incomplete

endeavour. 1,yndall Gordon's updated biography Eliot's New / A

Life (1988), Edward Lobb's T.S. Eliot and the Romantic

Critical Tradition (1981), Piers Gray Is $-.s. Eliot's

Intellectual and Poetic Development (1982), G.S. Jay's T.S.

Eliot and thc Poetics of Literary History (1983), and Louis

Menand's Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context

(1987), are but a few of the momorable titles with diverse

insights and perspectives. The trends are such that at the

turn of the century, Eliot criticism is likely to grow into

a dehumanised export commodity swelling in all directions,

and sold in all academic markets. Eliot awaits the

commercialisation o f devout anti-commercial and

anti-materia1:istic poetic propoganda as a tragic irony of

3 1 his literary fate.

An evaluation of this sort will be incomplete without

/ a note on the Indian response to T.S. Eliot's poetry which

was introduced to the Bengali audience by dgore as a sample

translation of "The Journey of the Magi" as early as in

1933. In the decades that followed, Eliot became a binding

poetic influence on the literary sensibility of Indian poets

and writers. Bishnu Dey, Dharamvir Bharathi, Harivamsaray

Bachan, Agyeya, Suresh Joshi, Ramachandra Sarma, Kakkad and

' Ayyappa Pai~~ker are some of the poets who came under the

influence of the modernist trends Eliot manifested in his

poetry. 3 8 As a result, many of them could initiate changes

in the poetic sensibility of their respective regional /'

literatures during the fifties and sixties, eroding a long

established and well-cherished romantic tradition that had

become the powerful medium of propaganda for social reform

and leftist polarisation of the political forces. Along

with the experimental theatrical trends like the Absurd and

/' /'

the Epic, t.he poetic modernism introduced into regional , /*

poetry by poets endowed with the Eliot spell, effected a .- -

welcome change in our acquired literary habits and notions

held sacred over the years. ,

But the academic industry on Eliot criticism was yet to

/ start in India. Some early attempts in this regard had only

generalised concern over Eliot as a man and as a poet. S.S.

Hoskot's T.S. Eliot: His Mind and Personality (1961), A.G.

George's T.S. Eliot: His Mind and Art (1963) and B.N.

Chaturvedi's T.S. Eliot (1963) are some of the early

examples in view. In late sixties and early seventies,

Eliot blossomed into a poetic, dramatic and critical

celebrity in the Indian imagination, and as a result, there

was a hectic effort on the part of Indian scholars to fix

Eliot in a set of poetic, philosophical and biographical

contexts. P.P. Raveendran gives an exhaustive list of

comparative and influence studies in his bibliographical

essay on the Indian response to T.S. Eliot. The names of

scholars include Sunil Kanti Sen, Mahendra Pratap Sangal,

C.T. Thomas, Mulk Raj Anand, K. Viswanathan, Mithra and

Mahasweta Sinha. 39 Eliot's Dantesque and Bradleyan

connections have been analysed by Indian scholars along with

the oriental influence on his spiritural concerns in poetry.

A distinctly different perspective in evaluations seems 1

to emerge ln Ahmed Ali's book entitled Mr Eliot's Penny

World of Drtxams ( 1 9 4 2 ) , which takes up a Marxian and

J

.. Freudian analytical pattern. Vikramaditya Rai's The Waste

Land: A Critical Study (1965), and Akhileswar Jha's T.S.

Eliot: An X'Ray of the Modern World (1989) are evaluations

of the relevance of Eliot's poetic ouput in the broad

socio-cultural and literary contexts. In the ever-swelling

Indian bibliography of T.S. Eliot criticism, we come across

A. Moghni's Eliot's Concept of Culture (1986), Ram A.

Yadav' s Politics and Original Sin: Some Notes on T.S.

Eliot's Political Philosophy (1985), Jyothi Prakash Sen's

The Progress of T.S. Eliot as Poet and Critic (1971) and

R.K. Kajal's Eliot and Impersonality (1984). Scholarly

essays by A. Das, N.K. Basu, D.A. Sankar, G.B. Mohan, K.

Rayan, P.Lal and D. Mohan are worth mentioning as dealing

with the different aspects of Eliot's poetry and poetic

theory. M.L. Raina's essay on "T.S. Eliot's Criticism of

the Novel" (1972) and J.C. Mahanti's essay on Eliot's views

on Dryden (1982) explore fringe areas of Eliot criticism

with perceptive insight. Indian literary journals also had

their regular supply of Eliot evaluations and the names

include C.D. Narasimhaiah, S.M. Chanda, M.M. Bhalla and A.N.

Dwivedi. "Reflections on The Waste Land" by V.A. Shahane,

" 'Where Shall the Word be Found?' A Note on Eliot's Poetic

Language," by R.S. Pathak, and "The Poetry of T.S. Eliot: A

Study in Images and Symbols" by A.N. Dwivedi are essays

manifesting ciriginal ways of thinking and appreciation. 4 0

Similarly,the anthology entitled T.S. Eliot: An Anthology of

Recent Criticism (1993) edited by Tapan Kumar Basu contains

some excellent essays such as, "T.S. Eliot: In His Time and

in Ours" by Basu, "Poetry as a Contemplative Analogue" by

Rama Nair "The Rooted Bard and the Rootless Satirist" by

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

both scholarship and insight in the right proportion

testifying to the scholastic maturity of the Indian academic

mind.

The Indian mystic traditio6 gets an easy entry into

Eliot's poetry as a result of the poet's manifest oriental

influences from his Harvard days. The mystic links have

been traced by K.S.N. Rao, M.E. Grenander, C.N. Rao, N.

Srivastava and D.B. Gosh. N.K. Gupta started the trend in

1951 with an analysis of the mystical elements in T.S

Ellot's poetry and this was taken up by Gowda in his study 6"

of the "stolc" rather than Vedantlc influence on T.S. Ellot.

C. D. Narasirrrhaiah fixed the Indian perspective by

instructing Indian scholars to seek "an Indian centre" to

evaluate a w o r k of art. 41 The concept of an Indian centre

includes the mystic, aesthetic and philosophical concerns of

the Indian tradition.

K. Krishnamoorthy's "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1964)

is an early attempt to study Eliot's poetry in the light of

rasadhvani theory. His is an attempt to conceive of the

three voices as the abhidha, laksa~a and rasa levels of

poetic communication. But his conception of objective

correlative as the very concept of sahitya in Sanskrit made /

him slip from the essential specificity necessary for the

application of a theoretical model to a Western poetic

sample as Eliot's. Krishna Rayan has also made earnest

efforts to correlate Indian dhvani theory to Eliot's poetic / concepts and practice. In SZhitya, a Theory, Rayan tries to

codify some basic concepts of Indian Aesthetics as

applicable to poetry in general and as related to some

modern Western critical theories in particular. His aim is

to create a consistent but unorthodox and adaptable system

of aesthetic concepts and values for the purpose of evolving

a genuinely Indian critical tradition. His prefatory note

to highlights this purpose. He says:

What is proposed in this book is not an entirely

novel theory but one developed from elements in

Indian systems of poetics and recent and

present-day Western theories. There clearly are

certain universals of literature which are stated

in early Indian theories and seem--not

superficially but in substance, though with

important differences--to have been independently

confirmed in 20th century Western theories : and

these universals cohere into a sysrem and offer a

complete self-sufficient account of just how a

literary text works. 4 2

When Eliot's poetry in general and The Waste Land in

particular arc becoming an almost inexhaustible source of

enquiry, evaluation and rediscovery in the West, the Indian

academic world also is giving mature responses commendable

in depth and range to these efforts. At the same time, we

have been exploring the possibility of seeking an Indian

centre for the appreciation of The Waste Land and other

poems based on our aesthetic tradition. /

- Charles Powell, "Manchcster Guardian Review," T.S.

Helen Gardner, "The Waste Land: Paris, 1992, " Eliot in

His Time, ed. A. Walton Litz (New Jersey: Princeton UP,

1973) 67.

Gardner 69

Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot (New York: Oxford ~ ~ , 1 9 8 4 )

5 5 .

Gardner 70.

Gardner 67

Tapan Kumar Basu, "T.S. Eliot: In His Time and in

Ours," T.S. E1iot:An Antholoqy of Recent Criticism, ed.

T.K. Basu (Delhi: Pencraft, 1993) 13.

Basu 12.

Michael Roberts, introduction to the first edition,

The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936; London: Faber, 1965)

8.

C.B. Cox and Arnold P. Hinchliffe, introduction, T.S.

Eliot: The Waste Land: A Casebook, eds. Cox and Hinchliffe

30.

Charles Powell, "Manchester Guardian Review," T.S.

Eliot: The Waste Land:A Casebook, eds. Cox and Hinchliffe -

3 0 .

"Times Literary supplement Review, " T.S. Eliot: The

Waste Land: A Casebook, eds. Cox and Hinchliffe 30.

l2 Cox and Hinchliffe, introd. 11.

l3 F.L. Lucas, "New Statesman Review, " T.S. Eliot: The

Waste Land:A Casebook, eds. Cox and Hinchliffe 37.

l4 Basu 13-14

l5 Basu 14.

l6 I.A. Richards, "The Poetry of T.S. Eliot,"

Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; London: Routledge

and Keyan Paul, 1955) 295.

l7 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London:

Chatto and Windus, 1930) 98-99.

F.R.Lcavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932;

London: Chatto and Windus, 1954) 95, 100, 103.

l9 F.R. 1,eavis 91.

" F.O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (New

York: Oxford UP, 1935) 35.

2 !~ blatthiessen 35, 40.

26 Cleanth Brooks, "The Waste Land: Critique of the

Dlyth," T.S. E1iot:The Waste Land: A Casebook, eds. Cox and

Hinchliffe 156.

27 Brooks 157.

28 Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (1959;

London: Methuen, 1965) 128.

29 Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study

in Sources 8 n d Meaning, (1956; Chicago UP, 1965) 95, 98.

3 0 Helen Gardner, "Four Quartets: A Commentary," T.S.

E1iot:A Study of His Writings by Several Hands, ed. B.Rajan,

(1947; Dennls Dobson, 1971) 60. 5

31 Gardncr," The Waste ~and'78.

32 Graham Hough, "Comments and Reactions, " T.S. Eliot:

The Waste Land:A Casebook, eds. Cox and Hinchliffe 234.

33 Frank Kermode, "A Babylonish Dialect," T.S. Eliot:

The Vlastc Land: A Casebook, eds. Cox and Hinchliffe 234.

3 4 Basu 22.

35 Basu 23.

3 6 Basu 24.

37 Basu 25.

38 P. P.Kaveendran, "T.S .Eliot Scholarship in India: A

Bihlioyraphical Essay," Indian Journal of American Studies

18.2 (1988): 129-30.

3 9 Raveendran 131.

4 0 These essays have been anthologised in Studies on

T.S. Eliot, ed. A.N.Dwivedi (New Delhi: Bahri, 1989).

4 1 Raveendran 133.

4 2 Krishna Rayan, preface, Sahithya, a Theorx (New

Delhi: Sterling, 1991) vii.