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English Modernist Poetry - T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

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Álvaro Marín Castañeda

University of Newcastle
A.Marin2@newcastle.ac.uk
20th November 2017
Introduction to Literary Studies I

ENGLISH MODERNIST POETRY: T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND

The Burial of the Dead

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable, —mon frère!”

Abstract: This essay will answer the following question: What is Modernism? We will
answer to this question by analysing T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Firstly
thematically and after that focusing in its style form and meter.

Keywords: Modernism, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, poetry, WWI.

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What is Modernism? Modernism is an artistic and aesthetic movement developed

between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This movement tries to depart from
classical and traditional forms. To understand the literary movement, first, we need to
place it in context i.e. Modernity Period. The era of modernity is characterized by
industrialization, the loss of certainty provoked by the new scientific approaches bringing
about an awakening of secularization, and by reactions against cruelty caused by the
World War I.

Concretely, in poetry these poets wrote in reaction to Victorian works. They were
influenced by the best practices of earlier poetry such as: French symbolism form
Baudelaire, the Metaphysical poets, Aristotelian, Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, etc.
(Blamires, 98).

During this period we can find great authors like: Erza Pound, James Joyce, D. H.
Lawrence or our main target T. S. Eliot among others. Concretely, we will focus on his
poem The Waste Land (1922) in order to identify within it the most relevant
characteristics of modernist poetry.

The Waste Land is a long poem structured in 5 sections – in this essay we will
only focus on the first one: “The Burial of the Dead”-. “The Waste Land is a text of the
First World War and its aftermath” (Cooper, 63). The sense of collapse and chaos
produced by the First World War is one of the main topics of T. S. Eliot’s poem e.g. “I
had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, /
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” (Eliot, lines 63-65). Moreover, we can
understand Eliot’s poem as a critique of modern society. It can sound nostalgic at the
beginning of the extract when he says “Unreal city, / Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had
undone so many.” (60-63) because he depicts the image of sadness and regret felt by the
European’s population.
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Besides, another interesting subject to analyse is the influence of other authors

presented in this extract. Eliot added some quotations that may serve us as an explanation
i.e. Dante’s Inferno “I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and
infrequent, were exhaled,” (Eliot, lines 62-63), or Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal
“hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!” (Eliot, line 76). Eliot’s idea of
collapse and chaos is reinforced with Dante’s quotation since he is trying to make us
think that these people neither are alive nor dead: they could be somewhere else like
Dante’s limbo.

Subsequently of the analysis of some of the main themes presented in the poem,
now we will focus on an analysis of its style, form and meter. The Waste Land is a
dramatic monologue, that is, a kind of poem written in the form of an individual
character. This kind of writing is very common in other Eliot’s writings such as: The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or Gerontion. However, The Waste Land is not a single
monologue because it shifts between monologue and dialogue. Another interesting
feature is its disjointed structure –really common in Modernist works-. Eliot is capable to
change from one voice or image to another without warning the reader, which makes a
sense of confusion.

After the analysis of the style our next step will be: form and meter. Modernist
poets have often rejected formal structure, they prefer an abstract environment rather than
a real one. The Waste Land is written in free verse, with no evident structure i.e. it does
not use regular rhyme or meter patterns. Hence, enjambment – an incomplete sentence at
the end of a verse which continues on the following- is the clearest example of this
irregularity e.g. “To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on
the final stroke of nine.” (Eliot, lines 67-68). Moreover, if we try to analyse the rhyme
scheme of this extract we clearly realise that there are not many rhyming verses e.g. “A
crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so
many.” (Eliot, lines 62-63).
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Throughout this essay, we have explained the main features of modernist poetry,
illustrated with examples of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Firstly, we have put in context
the poem in order to analyse its main topics and after that we have focused our attention
into an analysis of the style, form and meter of the poem. But maybe, we should follow
Cooper’s advice “The key to the poem may lie, paradoxically, in the fact that there is no
single key to its meaning. Indeed, the poem needs to be read in a way that was unfamiliar
to many contemporary readers of poetry in 1992 and still challenges readers today” (64).

.
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Works cited:

Blamires, Harry. Twentieth-Century English Literature. 2nd ed., Houndmills,

Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan, 1986.

Cooper, John Xiros. The Cambridge Introduction to T.S. Eliot. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2006.

Potter, Rachel. Modernist Literature. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

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