The Waste Land

The Waste Land is an unapologetically ambitious poem, a public poem in which Eliot—like many of the modernists—perceived the function of the Poet, capital P, not as some transcriber of private confessional emotions but rather as a priest with a wide-lens perception of the era. The Poet, then, is commissioned by virtue of that perception to perform a public role: the responsibility to direct, guide, and minister to a wounded and troubling society, to deliver, as part of that imperative, difficult insights about itself. People live in a waste land and do not even know it, the poet says. Come, the poet invites, and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Line 30). Although every generation since antiquity thinks it is the world’s last, for Eliot, the evidence that Western civilization was lost was compelling. Eliot, whose vast education grounded him in the wide-ranging study of Western civilization, perceived in his moment clear indications of Western civilization’s undeniable lapse into fragmentation, moral dissolution, spiritual drift, and psychological paralysis. In this, Eliot assumes the role of prophet—a visionary cursed with insight, able to see what others blithely ignore.

The pointless slaughter of The Great War, the widespread

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