Elliot – Waste Land

Not only is The Waste Land Elliot’s greatest work, but it may be – along with Joyce’s
Ulysses – the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921,
and it first appeared in print in 1922. Elliot was director of publishing house in 1888 – 1965,
he won a Nobel prize for literature in 1948. At the age of 25, in 1914 he emigrated to
England.

A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that
Elliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had
ravaged Europe. A sign of pessimism with which Elliot approaches his subject is the poem’s
epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl looks at the future and proclaims that
she only wants to die. Elliot’s poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a
vast range of sources. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem’s
writing Elliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its
apex in the Four Quartets. The main theme of the poem is disillusionment. While Elliot
employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference
possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence:
He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the 20th century.