Social Criticism and Personal Responsibility in “The Waste Land”

Since T.S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem was first published, The Waste Land has been interpreted as a criticism of the sterility and barrenness of modern culture. Both Eliot’s style and imagery convey that society is lifeless and out of joint, a common feeling in the period of shock and despair following World War I. However, a close reading shows that Eliot is placing the blame not just on society, but also on those who choose to submit to the hopelessness, apathy and immorality that society inspires in them. While condemning the sterility and alienation of the modern world, he is even more scathing of the people who choose merely to exist in it, rather than struggle for redemption and truly live.

Images of sterility predominate throughout the poem, both in the natural and civilized environments. From the desert landscape of the first section, where “the sun beats,/and the dead tree gives no shelter” (21–2), to the mountains of Section Five where there is “no water but only rock” (331), Eliot’s natural imagery is almost completely barren. Nearly all mentions of water, characterized as the primary life-giving force, exist only in the imagination of the narrator, for example “if there were water” (346).

In the city of London, the Thames has become a “dull canal” (189), instead of the flowing river alluded to by a line from Spenser’s Prothalamion, “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.” A brown fog perpetually obscures the sky, and all the great cities listed in the last section, Athens and London among them, have been reduced to “Falling towers” (374). The devastation is total, leaving no area unaffected and no individual immune.

The poem describes a ravaged moral landscape, as well, in which meaningless sexual encounters and perversions of religious ceremony predominate. Section Two draws a contrast between the wealthy adulteress, whose bedroom evokes Cleopatra’s barge, and the lower-class Lil, who fears losing her husband as she ages prematurely. However, both women are the victims of loveless, barren sexual relationships: the adulteress is overwhelmed by loneliness and Lil is forced into a traumatic abortion by the health risks of her over-fertility. Mrs. Porter, the madam in Section Three, not only violates social codes through prostitution, but also corrupts and trivializes the biblical ritual of foot washing by using soda water.

Few are able to resist the indifference instilled by the corrupted physical landscape; most succumb and fade to shadows of their former selves. This theme begins immediately with the epigraph, a quote from the sibyl at Cumae in Petronius’ Satyricon. Granted a wish by Apollo, she requested immortality, but not eternal youth. As her body withered away, so did her authority, and eventually she became a lonely husk of her former self who longed only for a death that would never come. While her condition arose partly from a twist of fate that she could not foresee or control, like the post-war devastation that Eliot’s generation faced, the real horror was her failure to fight for a life of purpose, foreshadowing the plight of the citizens who dwell in the urban environment of The Waste Land.

This message is reinforced almost immediately with a line from Dante’s Inferno, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (63). As Dante enters the inferno, he encounters a group of spirits who are associated with it, but not part of it. These spirits are completely lacking in identity and have been rejected from both heaven and hell because rather than do good or evil, they chose to do nothing at all. They are destined to spend the rest of eternity in a limbo brought on by their insipid lives and their inability to commit to any course of action.

In The Waste Land, the spirits are represented by the inhabitants of the “Unreal City” (60), a name taken from a poem by Baudelaire. A symbolist whose style influenced Eliot as well, Baudelaire often wrote about the dark side of urban life and its alienating effects. Like the spirits, the city-dwellers are passive, with short sighs as their only protests, and isolated, looking at their feet instead of interacting with each other (64–5). They are trapped even more tightly by their unwillingness to act on their own behalves.

In contrast to these passive shades are the questing figures: Shakleton, a contemporary explorer who appears briefly in Section Five, and the knight from the Grail Quest.

In Eliot’s notes on the poem, he indicates that the verse paragraph beginning “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” (360), reminded him of a near-death experience that Shakleton’s team described after returning. After they become stranded on a polar expedition, they began a dangerous hike across the ice as a last hope of survival. As their condition worsened, they became slightly delirious, and it always seemed to them that there was one more among them than they could actually count. This passage highlights that humanity can face enormous obstacles, pass through the waste land, and return to a productive and meaningful life, with the intervention of a higher power or even their own better nature.

The other quest figure, the Knight seeking the Grail, has even more optimistic connotations. In The Waste Land, the Arthurian legend is tied to the myth of the Fisher King. In both stories, a kingdom has been devastated by drought and famine due to the impotence or illness of the king. For the kingdom to be redeemed and return to prosperity, a knight must face great hardships and retrieve the Grail, either a chalice and spear, ancient symbols of potency. As the Knight approaches the chapel in Section Five, Chapel Perilous in the Arthurian legend, the imagery shifts dramatically. The desert heat of the earlier sections gives way to a “damp gust bringing rain” (394–5), the relief needed by the king’s “arid plain” (425). In both these stories and the poem, the only thing capable of overcoming the wasteland is the heroic struggle of the individual.

The ability to overcome death and despair in The Waste Land is also shown in its cycles of renewal. The intertwining of the Grail Legend and the story of the Fisher King serves at one example, as do the many references to processes of regrowth and regeneration.

In Part One, during the description of the desert, the speaker asks “what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?” (19–20). The question is never answered because, according to the speaker, the listener could not comprehend. He has limited understanding because the picture he sees is only “A heap of broken images” (22), where fragmentation has led to loss of meaning. Because all he can see is the wasteland, it is all he knows. However, the implication that the desert could soon support life provides hope for a different and better future.

This hope is reinforced at the end of the section, when the narrator asks a man named Stetson if “That corpse you planted last year in your garden/has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (71–2). The bed mentioned in the next line has both agricultural and sexual connotations; here, death will lead to new growth unless its progress is disturbed by the dog, the supposed “friend to men” (74).

The Christian resurrection myth appears in the poem’s conclusion, significant for its messages of both redemption and personal responsibility. References to “the frosty silence in the gardens” and “the agony in stony places” (323–4) allude to the crucifixion of Christ, as well as to springtime, when his death and resurrection are commemorated. The narrator mentions that “He who was living is now dead” (328), however the story is resolved with his rebirth and the redemption of the entire human race through Christ’s sacrifice.

This willingness to suffer and struggle for some ultimate gain is reinforced through other religious allusions. Buddha and St. Augustine appear in the center of the poem, embedded in the stories of the questing figures. Eliot uses these figures to convey that humanity’s only hope for redemption is through personal effort and sacrifice.

In his “Fire Sermon,” the inspiration for the title of Section Three, Buddha advocated for the relinquishment of all worldly passions and desires, specifically lust. He taught that they were as destructive to the spirit as fire was to material things, and must be abandoned before enlightenment could be reached. Later in the same section is the line, “To Carthage then I came” (307), from Augustine’s Confessions. In this essay, Augustine describes searching out sexual encounters for the sole purpose of sensory experience. At the time he writes it, he has become penitent, and seeks to be purged of his old sins. This juxtaposition of eastern and western asceticism creates an almost universal appeal for redemption, presumably through the fire represented by the repetition of “burning” in the following lines.

Society in The Waste Land and in Eliot’s time may have appeared beyond repair, but there are always glimpses of hope if we look carefully. The cyclical nature of the poem, the interwoven stories of past heroes, and the cautious optimism of Tiresias, the presumed narrator, all offer at least the possibility of new growth. The waste land can always be cultivated if citizens are willing to act for change rather than submit like the lost souls of the inferno.