On the 100th Anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
So begins “The Waste Land,” often recognized as one of the most important poems of the 20th century. Dr. Dutton Kearney, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, believes that T.S. Eliot had a gift for presenting the greatness of the Western tradition to his own generation.
In Lecture 9 of our free online course, “Great Books 102: Renaissance to Modern,” Dr. Kearney teaches students how to read Eliot and especially how to approach the many allusions he uses throughout his poetry. Eliot uses them as teaching devices to draw readers into the tradition, making them look up what he is referencing for themselves. Blind adherence to tradition should be avoided. Rather, as Dr. Kearney puts it, “Tradition is to be learned with great labor and significant investment of time.”
T.S. Eliot and Contemporary Poetry
First published 100 years ago this month, Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is one of his most beloved poems and requires careful study. Taking Dante’s Divine Comedy as a framework for understanding the progression of Eliot’s poetry throughout his career, Dr. Kearney argues that “The Waste Land”—an epic in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton—represents Eliot’s transition from Inferno to Purgatorio, one step closer to redemption and salvation.
An American by birth who later became a British subject by choice, Eliot wrote in free verse, attempting to combine the freedom of Whitman with the form of Baudelaire. In exploring his poems, one discovers the rhythm, order, and structure of Eliot, who helped to revitalize contemporary poetry and secure a place for it in the great conversation of Western literature.
“The Waste Land” is dedicated to Ezra Pound, who helped jumpstart Eliot’s career. Pound wanted contemporary poetry to exert the same kind of influence on culture that Homer had for the Greeks. For Pound, a great work changes how we read what came before it; the great tradition is not a conversation, but a series of greatness outdoing greatness over the course of history.
Redeeming the Times
But according to Dr. Kearney, Eliot breaks from Pound and instead sees the great tradition as being alive. “Individual poems are always subordinated to the tradition.” Eliot’s understanding of the world and of the great tradition is also greatly impacted by his understanding of the Incarnation, which opens up for man a concrete future immortality in God, not in art.
After the carnage of World War I, Pound “didn’t see that civilization was worth saving in the first place.” He wanted to “make it new.” But Eliot didn’t want to start all over. In his poem “Ash Wednesday,” he said he wanted to “Redeem the time. Redeem the unread vision in the higher dream.”
When he published “The Waste Land” in 1922, Eliot was still five years away from converting to the Christian faith, and he speaks only obliquely about Christianity in this poem. It begins with the description of a life not lived well—a life of despair. But it ends on a hopeful note, with an admonition for self-control. “For Eliot,” Dr. Kearney explains, “self-control is giving oneself over to something higher than oneself—giving oneself over to God.”
What separates Eliot from his contemporaries “is his insistence upon the transcendent, and notably, a transcendence that comes to us through revealed religion.” Where others, like Pound, fell short by seeking to supplant the divine, Eliot refocuses our attention upon it.
“Eliot’s focus on recovering the Christian intellectual tradition reorients us back toward the permanent things that he, and we at Hillsdale, love so much.” Celebrate the 100th anniversary of “The Waste Land” by finding the full text under the “Readings” tab for Lecture 9 after signing up for the course.
