The Literature Book

213

See also: Les Fleurs du mal 165 ■ Ulysses 214–21 ■ A Portrait of the Artist as a

You ng Ma n 241

M

odernist poetry in early

20th-century Europe

and the US embodied

a feeling that the prevailing poetic

ethos, with its firm attachment

to Romantic subjectivity and

traditional forms, was poorly suited

to a modern cosmopolitan culture of

revolutionized science, technology,

and social values. The Modernist

poets moved away from making

personal statements toward a more

intellectual objectivity, and gave up

any attempt to imagine a pastoral

idyll or turn away from the

complexities of the city.

Rhythmical grumbling

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) described

his Modernist masterpiece

The Waste Land as “just a

piece of rhythmical grumbling.”

An American who transformed

himself, in London, into an

English man of letters, he wrote

much of it while recuperating from

a breakdown. But contemporaries

such as American poet Ezra Pound

saw its pessimism, its fragmented

forms, its unmarked quotations in

several languages, and its shifting

voices as a brilliant reflection of the

disorders of the postwar world and

its metaphorical barrenness. The

critic Clive Bell, brother-in-law of

Virginia Woolf, saw the influence

of the Jazz movement in the poem,

calling it a “ragtime literature

which flouts traditional rhythms.”

The title of the poem refers

to the Arthurian legend of the

Fisher King—a king tasked with

taking care of the Holy Grail, whose

impotence affects not just his

ability to father children, but the

fertility of his entire kingdom,

which becomes an arid wasteland.

Water and thirst, and death implied

within growth, are major themes

of Eliot’s poem: from its very

beginning, even the coming of

spring holds no promise.

The poem creates the effect of

looking through a rapidly turned

kaleidoscope of spiritual (and

psychological and social) anxiety.

Both lyricism and magnificence

feature in the quotations and

pastiches—but only as ironic

counterpoints to desolation. ■

BREAKING WITH TRADITION

RAGTIME LITERATURE

WHICH FLOUTS

TRADITIONAL RHYTHMS

THE WASTE LAND (1922), T. S. ELIOT

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Modernist poetry

BEFORE

1861–65 In Massachusetts,

Emily Dickinson privately

writes her many masterpieces:

short, unconventional poems

of religious doubt, anticipating

the visionary originality of Ezra

Pound and T. S. Eliot.

1915–62 Ezra Pound’s Cantos,

a poetic epic, is akin to The

Waste Land in its erudite,

magpie complexity and direct,

unsentimental language.

1915 Eliot’s “The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the

monologue of a disillusioned

man, is a milestone on the way

to full poetic Modernism.

AFTER

1923 Harmonium, a collection

by American poet Wallace

Stevens, brings a vivid yet

philosophical imagination

to Modernism, spinning

poems of elusive beauty.

US_212-213_Owens_WasteLand.indd 213 03/11/2015 15:21