Thomas Stearns Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 for his outstanding contribution to the world of contemporary poetry. One of his pioneering works is The Wasteland. For Eliot, the moor symbolizes that area of human life where men exist without guiding faith, where men have turned their backs on spiritual enlightenment, and the title points to this dilemma.
The poem, divided into five parts, is thus fragmented, devoid of logical continuity and temporal sequence, and is a projection of the psychological oscillations and conflicts that raged in the human soul at the beginning of the 20th century (the situation is no different today). Eliot felt that Western civilization had become mechanical, boring, and dehumanized. Corruption, degeneracy, and stark materialism were rampant. In this broken and fragmented world, nothing could be integrated.
Although the poem is a jagged kaleidoscopic entity, it holds together only in the all-encompassing prophetic vision of Tiresias, the bisexual blind seer of ancient Greek tragedy, and what Tiresias sees is the substance of the entire poem. Psychologically speaking, it is the conscience of humanity. As a symbol of the past that still survives in the present, old Tiresias, “with his wrinkled feminine breast”, has suffered from all that is being enacted on the ugly stage of the contemporary world.
He transcends the barrier of time and place with swift flashes embracing with his vacant gaze, now a scene in the present – the images of “the ruins of London bridge falling”, a “pulsing and waiting taxi”, to personify the life of an immoral and lascivious typist of the 20th century, as well as of the past – Dante’s hell, the love sport of Cleopatra, Elizabeth, and brings out in our mental image the enormity of the sin committed by the mythical king Oed ipus of Thebes – the land devastated by drought and sin – in his sexual violation of his mother Jocasta, and the need to purify the soul of the sinner through suffering.
In The Wasteland, the images and symbols fall broadly into two categories: images taken from the commonplace aspects of urban life but elevated to great intensity (the throbbing image of the taxi), and symbols of myth, nature, and religion, centered on the theme of death and rebirth. Thus, drought symbolizes spiritual dryness and rain spiritual fertility. However, certain objects can symbolize two opposing ideas depending on their functions. Thus, water is, on the one hand, a symbol of creation – of life and growth, of purification and transformation, in the form of a river or sea, and, on the other hand, it is also destructive of life and property. Similarly, fire as a destructive agent is symbolic of lust that consumes a person to a state of “living death”; but fire, as the sacred flame of the altar, is also a symbol of inspiration, illumination and spiritual exaltation. Eliot constantly plays with ambivalent images.
From post-war European society, its spiritual sterility is conveyed by the symbol of a stony, barren soil. The idea of a dead end, of life reaching a dead end, is conveyed by the symbol of the “chess game”. The idea of u200bu200blife as meaningless, boring and languid movement in a narrow circle is conveyed by the image “we are living in a rat alley where the dead lost their bones.” The idea is reinforced by the images of misery and vulgarity, such as the river sweating oil and tar and dragging along its current the dirty cargo of empty bottles, cigarette butts, silk scarves and other testimonies of summer parties and sexual encounters between city nymphs and their random lovers.
The theme of sterility, decay and death is intertwined with the search for life and resurrection that Eliot found in the legend of the Holy Grail and other anthropological myths, with a dash of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu religious religious analogies, and the feeling of this state and freedom are conveyed by the image of a smooth boat under the experts, to God, to those who balance it on the scales of the rules of this state and are conveyed by the image, and the image of the image of the image of the image of the image of the image of those who are made, what makes the reversities, what makes the reversities, what makes the image, what makes the image, is made of the image of the image of the image of those who are made. Hence, self-aggrandizement.
The Wasteland is Eliot’s spiritual autobiography, his search through the junk heap of modern culture for an integrating principle just as you would with Pilgrim’s Progress (From this world to that is to come, by John Bunyan). Eliot’s vision moves back and forth in a relentless movement back and forth over legend, belief, and symbol. And, at the end, the pilgrim, now apparently a solitary figure, continues walking. The grass is “singing” and there comes a wet taste that brings rain,” a symbol of rejuvenation, of resurrection. Three claps of thunder are heard, and the voice of thunder, in Sanskrit, offers three words of advice: “Give, sympathize, and control” – “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih,” the peace that passes all understanding. Eliot sees the solution to the human situation in Hindu religious terms.
Eliot imposes the problem of the wasteland on us because we, whether we know it or not, are the citizens of the “unreal city” and must find our Grail: the plate used by Jesus at the Last Supper and on which one of his followers is said to have received His blood at the Crucifixion.