15/8/2021 Kyle Ross

Jean Clifford Eng 104-04

T.S Elliot: Poet of the Ashes

T.S Elliot was an American born writer who journeyed and eventually settled in England after developing a
passion for Victorian and High-style literary works. He graduated from Harvard University in 1910 earning
his Bachelors and his Masters degrees in four years, emigrated to Britain and became a professor at Oxford
University. While he claimed to be rooted in old-style Victorian writings, he became famous for his
contemporary writings, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Some of his more renowned works
include The Hollow Men and The Wasteland, both of which became renowned for their passionate
depictions of Post-World War I society and the impacts that war had on the subsequent generations that
followed.

Reading from The Hollow Men, we can clearly see that Leslie Marmon Silko, in her description of Tayos’
broken and fragmented mindset, borrows from Elliots’ descriptions of the broken men that returned home
after witnessing the horrors of the Great War, and the devastating and impassionate horrors of modern
warfare.

(read from the Hollow Men)

In the first Canto we see how Silkos description of Tayos’ memories of the Vetreans Hospital, like
white smoke, coincides with Elliots’ images of “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force,
gesture without motion”. The loss of the self in a haze of death and terror is a very powerful image,
especially when you consider how many soldiers in World War I must of felt huddling in the ground, egged
on by dreams of glory and honour in battle, only to find themselves whimpering in terror. Tayos’ cyclical
memories always drift back to those recollections of helplessness, and how he was powerless to save Rocky
from the Japanese bayonette. His mind is huddling in terror, and to save itself, it refuses to acknowledge the
world around it, reflecting the image of the “hollow man, the stuffed man… our dried voices… are quiet
and meaningless”. By blocking out the world in which he felt such suffering he is saving what is left of
himself by blocking out the world around him. As Europe was torn apart by a hail of exploding metal and
human flesh, Elliot also reflected on how the land was shaped along with the minds of men. Just as Tayo
sees his home as a dried up and cracked shadow of the place he once knew, Elliot saw Europe in the same
light. “This is the Dead land, this is cactus land…. Is it like this in death’s other kingdom walking alone”.

(Excerpt from The Wasteland)

Here is no water
but only rock
Rock and no water
and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink 335
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 340
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water 345
And no rock
If there were rock
15/8/2021 Kyle Ross
Jean Clifford Eng 104-04

And also water

And water
A spring 350
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock 355
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Again, in The Wasteland we see images of the broken and parched land; of ever present water that remains
torturously out of reach. Indeed, Silko steals the first line of his poem, “April is the cruellest month”,
though she chooses to use it in the sense that the rain is always just across the horizon, rather than the
imagery of flowers creeping out of earth fertilized by the bodies of dead men.

I personally love reading works that have clear historical or literary inspiration because it gives us
a new way of looking at those events and works.