City of dead souls: The Waste Land and the modern moment | The British Library

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• This is a poem about waste and the possibility of the collapse of civilisation, alongside an alternative possibility of regeneration through some recovered purity of feeling

• The modernist experiment in writing, led by Eliot’s poems written between 1917 and 1922, followed the experiments in art, music and dance of a decade earlier. In the summer of 1921

• he went to see Sacre performed by the Diaghilev Ballet in London. In his ‘London Letter’ for the New York Dial, he said that Stravinsky’s music seemed to ‘transform

• barbaric noises of modern life’.

• In some ways The Waste Land is a social document accumulating evidence against civilisation through the ages. At the same time the poem is a vision of sorts, a vision of horror,

• ‘The horror! The horror!’, taken from Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness

• Conrad’s disturbed witness to savagery in the Congo finds an equivalent savagery when he returns to the ‘sepulchral city’ – a city of dead souls like the surreal London of Eliot’s great poem

• nd ourselves imprisoned in the ‘Unreal City’.

• Reality, undefined in this poem, is implied by its absence

• anti-wasteland.

• to be inside The Waste Land is to experience this loss of what Eliot terms reality

• Silence is central to this poem

• comes to us as a counter to cacophony

• Eliot often alludes to literary and religious predecessors – St Augustine, Conrad, Dante – who nerved themselves to explore a psychic underworld and to articulate their findings for those of us who don’t venture that far.

• Eliot’s heroes of communication

• The Waste Land’s opening statement, ‘April is the cruellest month’, knocks against the pleasurable anticipation of other Aprils in English literature, in which spring is a delicious awakening. Here, to come alive after the deadness of winter is a cruel ordeal,

• How does Eliot define the condition of deadness? One way is with intermittent intimations of what is not dead: the hyacinth girl; the unworldly fishmen who live on the edge of mortality; the inexplicable splendour of St Magnus Martyr; children’s voices chanting in the chapel; and the thunder, oncoming rain and bells that command a pilgrim’s attention in the finale

• leaves us in some interface between the horror of urban decay and the need for ‘Shantih’, the peace that passes understanding; between the Unreal City and unspoken reality. It leaves us haunted by momentary glimpses of reality and appalled by the fall into worthless schemes of existence.