The Waste Land of Post World War I Europe

World War I, or as it was known to the people who lived through it, The Great War, was a historically unprecedented event. The most powerful nations in the world formed two alliances that fought, mobilizing millions of military personnel, and the result was the death of millions of people. The destructive nature of the four year long war had many irreversible effects of the state of society, the way that people lived their lives, and how they felt about the world around them. The world would never be the same, and many people felt they were living in a desolate and destroyed world. In "The Waste Land," perhaps one of his greatest literary achievements, T. S. Eliot captured the feeling helplessness, uncertainty, and regret that plagued Europe in the years that followed the Great War.

Published in the early 1920's, "The Waste Land," was received with a mixture of critics who either praised it for its genius or those who questioned its form and content. While many people believed that the complexity of the poem was meant to reflect the confusion and disorder felt by a world in the wake of the devastation of World War I, others were not convinced, "... The Waste Land attracted notoriety for its complexity and was charged with being purposefully obscure and unintelligible. Some early-twentieth-century reviewers even accused Eliot of perpetrating a hoax on the general public- producing an undecipherable work of the purpose of literary elitism."(Lee).

In his post war creation, Eliot used a variety of sources which are woven into the poem, and the speaker changes from stanza to stanza. The fragmentation of his writing throughout the poem gives the reader the feeling of disorientation that the modern world provided. Many of his sources that are referenced by Eliot are relatively well know such as the Bible, Shakespeare, and a variety of ancient and medieval myths and legends, but others are more obscure such as little known playwrights. The reader is required to have a good understanding of symbolism, history, and literature to form an understanding of the poem. In many circles "The Waste Land" was viewed as nothing short of a masterpiece, but still others were quite put off by its complex and some-what fragmented form (Lee). While there was not a universal feeling of critical acclaim when "The Waste Land" was first published, no one could argue that it was not thought provoking. It forced the reader to search for the meaning of the words due to its intense complexity; "The Waste Land" was not a work to be read lightly.

The world had been drastically transformed by the war and people were facing a bleak and uncertain future. In order to capture the true essence of the war ravaged remains of Europe, T. S. Eliot shows his readers several different scenes and uses a variety of perspectives to show that many of the feelings conveyed in his poem were universal, rather than the view of an individual or a single speaker. By switching to different speakers in differing situations, the reader is given the feeling that the content and the context of "The Waste Land" was a reflection of post war Europe as a whole, rather than the personal view of one speaker, or of the poet himself. The way the poem is constructed, the reader is given a broader, all encompassing view of society through these brief glimpses of individuals.

The first words of the poem, "April is the cruelest month" (Eliot, Line1), set the tone for the entire piece. April is typically thought of as a time of rebirth and renewal; the beginning of spring following the cold months of winter. In his Eliot's vision of post war Europe, rather than a time for renewal, April becomes a time of a sort of limbo between death and devastation, and rebirth and redemption. The end of World War I left people wondering what the fate of the world would be. Many questioned whether or not recovery possible?

The debilitating effects of the Great War left many feeling helpless, and complacent. The coming of April, normally symbolizing a time of regeneration, is cruel to remove people from their complacent state, or winter, and force them to confront the issues that lingered after the war had ended, "The winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow..." (Eliot, 5-6). These lines suggest that while society may have been in a cold, drab, and desolate state, it was far more comforting and welcome than the unknown future and dealing with the ghosts of a regretful past. There was a colossal loss of life during the years of fighting, the displacement of soldiers who came home to find no work and families who had changed or no longer existed, class barriers had become a thing of the past, censorship was a common practice, and police power was expanded during wartime. Along with these, and many other social challenges, post war Europe faced many political challenges as well, such as, the reconstruction of countries, governments, and economies (Bretts).

In the second stanza, the reader is taken to a desolate and war ravaged land, "A heap of broken images where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief," (Eliot, 22-23). The speaker in the poem finds this place unwelcoming and lonely, which is undoubtedly the feeling that soldiers had returning from long deployments to families they no longer knew and homelands that they could scarcely recognize. The reader is given a feeling of profound loneliness in the lines, "Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you" (Eliot, 28-29), from morning to night, a shadow is the only company to be found in this isolated place. Many soldiers had come home to find that they had been replaced by women in the job force, and few, if any, of the returning men received proper treatment for the traumatizing reality that they were forced to face on the battlefield. The end of the war returned them to a place where no one understood them. Even the dirt beneath their feet was a grim reminder of the war they had suffered through, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" (Eliot, 30). The dirt of their homelands had been tainted with the blood and remains of the millions of soldiers who were injured or sacrificed on the battlefield.

The feeling of desolation is further emphasized by Eliot's comparison of his post war London and Dante's hell. "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many." (Eliot 62-63), from "The Waste Land" is taken from the Third Canto of Dante's "Inferno" (Cleanth). The speaker is witness to a crowd, and amidst the many people in the crowd, recognizes only one person, "There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!" (Eliot 69). Eliot's speaker, like Dante, sees only one person whom he recognizes among the many people that are in this contemporary waste land (Woelfel).

The connections found throughout "The Waste Land" to Dante's "Inferno," almost certainly stem from the common view of the human experience shared by both of the authors. The Dante reference above is one of many that can be found in this poem. Eliot uses the tone and context of Dante's writing to embellish the daunting feeling one might have living in such uncertain times. "In The Waste Land, Eliot repeatedly invokes Dante in an almost masochistically negative fashion...to illustrate the consequences of the modern absence of compassion or sympathy and the radical inability of the poet to construct a redemptive vision of society." (Woelfel)

World War I had forced a shift that was felt around the globe. In Europe the changes that occurred must have left many of its people in a state of shock. The Victorian Era, which preceded this harsh modern reality, was not without fault, but there was a sense of prosperity and order that Victorianism bestowed upon the people of England. When T. S. Eliot wrote "The Waste Land," England had lost its position as one of the most powerful nations of the world. War had changed the economic, political, and social climate of all of Europe and many feared that peace would not last. The fighting was over, but the new world that was birthed from the turmoil of the war was unfamiliar and unpredictable. For many this new world was transformed into a sort of hell on earth, which made Dante's work excellent references to convey the feelings of not only individual people, but of entire nations following the war (Bretts).

There was a new mood in Europe. There was a distinct collapse of what had been called "Victorian morality," causing social upheaval after the world war had produced a revolution of public behavior (Bretts). The dynamic of the entire world had been forever changed by the catastrophic impact of the First World War, and many people were undoubtedly left feeling confused, lost, and bewildered by the rapid changes that had taken place. In "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot used a complex form to comprise a text that is riddled with references, and is seen through the eyes of many differing perspectives. Upon first reading this piece, one is immersed in a confusing, and almost indecipherable work of literature. It is only when the reader begins to pick apart the poem, line by line, that they can truly discover the meaning of the words the Eliot has written. Writing a piece that leaves people who read it feeling lost until they are able to dig themselves out after careful consideration and study, is perhaps, the only kind of writing that could truly convey the way life was in the time in which this poem was written.

Works Cited

Betts, Raymond F. Disorder: Europe in the 1920's. Britannia. July 13 2009.

Cleanth Brooks, `The Waste Land': Critique of the Myth, in his Modern Poetry and the Tradition, The University of North Carolina Press, 1939, pp. 136-72.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. The Norton Anthology of English Literature Eighth Edition VolumeTwo. Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams eds.New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2006. 2295-2308.

Lee, Michelle. Poetry Criticism. Vol. 90. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008 p201-342.

Woelfel, Craig. The Waste Land and Dante's Poetics of Revelation. http://www.fondazione- delbianco.org/seminary/progetti_prof/progview.asp?id=1173>