The Enduring Importance of T.S. Eliot

How modernism prophesied the end of meaningful art in the Western world

Sometimes in the history of art, the state of a person’s mind comes to align with and signify the state of a culture as a whole. Those artists of generational genius, who think deeply and who suffer at their own hands become, as T.S. Eliot himself put it, “the highest point of consciousness in a civilisation.” They voice cultures as fault lines move, and looking back they offer us orientation points of how we came to be where we are.

This was the case in 1922 when T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, a poem that is at once mesmerising and difficult, oddly moving and completely obtuse. For T.S. Eliot it was the result of depression and the breakdown of a marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, of which he said “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”

And this state of mind was one of fractured depression. Some of it was written during a period recuperating from a nervous breakdown in the seaside town of Margate, which sneaks in in the only lines in the poem that contain anything directly autobiographical: “”On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing”.