Question- Write a note on the structure of Eliot's 'The Waste Land'.

Or
"In structure the Waste Land is essentially an arrangement of fragments." Do you agree with this view?

Answer -

Instead of a basis of accepted belief, the whole structure of Eliot's poem is based on certain primitive rituals and myths which, he seems to feel, must be psychological certainties, being a part of what psychologists call our 'race memory'. He is appealing to scientific legend, while Yeats appealed to poetic legend. The authority behind The Waste Land is not the Catholic Church nor romantic love, but anthropology from the volumes of Sir James Frazer's, The Golden Bough. Eliot has tried to indicate, beneath the very ephemeral and violent movements of our own civilization, the gradual and magical contours of man's earliest religious beliefs. The effect he sets out to achieve is illustrated by Freud's remark on civilization and its discontents that the growth of the individual mind resembles the growth of Rome, supposing that modern Rome, as it is today, were coexistent with the buildings of Rome at every period in her history, and that beneath the modern architecture we was found the architectures of every earlier period, in a perfect state of preservation.

The basic symbol used, in the Waste Land is taken of course, from Miss Jessie Weston's from Ritual to Romance. In the legends which she treats there, the land has been plighted by a curse. The crops do not grow and the animals cannot reproduce. The plight of the land is summond up by, and connected with, the plight of the lord of the land, King Fisher who has been rendered impotent by maiming or sickness. The curse can be removed only by the appearance of a knight who will tell the meaning of the various symbols displayed in the Castle. The shift in meaning from physical to spiritual sterility is easily made, and was, on a matter of fact, made in certain of the legends. As Eliot has pointed out, a knowledge of this symbolism is essential for an understanding of the poem is hardly less importance to the reader, however, is a knowledge of Eliot's basic method. The Waste Land is built on a major contrast-a device which is a favourite of Eliot's and is found in many of his poems, particularly in his later poems. The contrast is between the two kinds of life and the two kinds of death. Life devoid of a meaning is death or sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be life giving, an awakening of life. The poem occupies itself to a great extent with this paradox, and with a number of variations upon it.     - (Cleanth Brooks) 

The basic method used in the Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity. The poet works in terms of surface parallelisms, which in reality make ironic contrasts and in terms of surface contrasts, which in reality constitute parallelisms. (The second group sets up effect which may be described as the observe of irony). The two aspects taken together give the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole, though the realistic surface of experience is faithfully retained. The complexity of the experience is not violated by the apparent forcing upon it by predetermined scheme.     - (Cleanth Brooks)

The poem is a puzzle. His emotions never reach readers without tranversing a zig-zag line of allusions. His purpose is to jerk us to an awareness of an experience. He has provided us notes more beneficial to pendantics than to readers. The poet was under the influence of F. H. Breadley who taught him to see the present not merely as ephimeral but embodying all the past, present and future. Some says that the poem expresses a sense of affirmation rather than of despair. F. R. Leavis writes, "It expresses World War I disillusionment". Mr. Matthisen considers it, "as an agony of society without belief". Tschumi echoes it as a, "Neo scholastic blend of revealed and objective truth". There are critics who hold that it is a sprawling chaotic poem with no theme. It is a loose medley of diffuse emotions.

The theme of the poem is materialism versus existentialism, The Waste Land is a symbol for the materialist mind. It is full of selfishness and lust because of materialistic philosophy. Materialism maintains that there exists in the universe only one substance called matter so, it denies the independent existence of the soul. The materialist therefore, holds that the concept of the human soul as it is understood in religion is a myth, a fragment of the imagination. Hence, he rejects the spiritual and tends to devote himself exclusively to satisfy his physical and mental urges, and to a mass wealth. But Eliot is a Christian existentialist and spiritualist. He holds that the spirit has a real existence apart from the matter. He also holds that human life is a stage for the upliftment of the soul. But modern materialistic life is a Waste Land for the human soul. The theme of the Waste Land is sexual impotence used as a symbol for the spiritual malady of the modern world. This symbol is developed by means of a myth which had been much studied by contemporary anthropologists. This is the vegetation myth with the rites of fertility based upon it, found in the Eastern cults described by Sir James Frazer in his Attis, Adonis, Osiris (1920), to which Eliot acknowledges a particular debt. The specific example of the myth which he selects is derived from the theory of Miss J. L. Weston expounded in several of her books and notably in From Ritual to Romance (1920). Miss Weston's theory was that the story of the quest for the Holy Grail was a Christianized vision of an ancient ritual, having for its ultimate object the initiation into the sources of life, physical and spiritual, in fact a ritual based on a vegetation myth of the same kind as the myth of Adonis and similar Eastern cults. The Grail romances tell tale of a Waste Land ruled by a mained and impotent King Fisher. The King is freed from his impotence and the land from its aridity by a deliverer (Gawain or Percival) who makes use of certain magical instruments, a lance or spear and the grail of sacred chalice, which clearly symbolizes sexual activity. The use of old mythology either as a simple tale or an allegory was clearly impossible for a poet of Eliot's sophistication. He showed, however, that a modern poet could make effective use of mythology, with the help of the psychologist and the anthropologist.     - (Geoffrey Bullough)

The poem is not fragmentary, interweaving is not mechanical or organic forming shows a coherent pattern in the poet's search for spiritual wisdom. A number of traditions and fragments of cultures have been interwoven into the poem, and the whole of meaning, and giving coherence to the apparently formless poem. The three Waste Lands of the past are woven together with the modern waste land, and the wisdom of the east and the west is offered as a solution for the ills of the present age. Thus, a coherent philosophy of life emerges from a study of the poem.

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