Free Waste Land Essays: The Current Relevance :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The Current Relevance of The Waste Land Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, is at least as relevant to life today as it was in 1922, when it was first published. All of the themes stated at the beginning of the Norton Anthology's introduction to the poem ("spiritual dryness," a lack of "regenerating belief" to give meaning to life, and death without resurrection) are with us to an even greater degree than they were at the time the poem was first published. (Introduction 2146) The attitudes toward sexuality that are implicitly condemned throughout the work have not changed in any way that Eliot would be likely to see as an improvement, either. "The Waste Land" does not merely present an anthropological description of a culture, however, and the solution proposed by Eliot seems as relevant today as it must have been in 1922. Like Blake, Eliot constructs a personal mythology, but Eliot draws on a larger number of sources than Blake does: various religions from both the east and the west, works of literature from around the world, and works of philosophy and anthropology. Eliot refers to the fragmentary references throughout the poem at the end of the poem by saying, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" -- that is, Eliot has taken fragmentary references and pieced them together in an attempt to come to grips with the modern situation in which he finds himself. (line 431) The references from the poem are nearly always references to the past, when a cultural heritage was common to an entire people, the themes described in the Norton Anthology's introduction were nonexistent (or were problematic to a much lesser degr ee than in the modern era), and when sexuality found its expression in a context Eliot would have seen as appropriate -- a mature relationship between men and women that expresses both love and physical passion. Perhaps more important than the building of this personal mythology, however, is the solution Eliot explicitly offers in "What the Thunder Said." Eliot weaves in a Hindu story in which gods, devils, and humans each ask their common father, Prajapati, for advice.