The Waste Land: An Anti-Quest

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
                                         —T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

The most important poem of the twentieth century is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Famously, it gave vivid expression to the cultural crisis that followed the Great War, while providing vital insights into the mental world of the literary and artistic Modernists who went on to shape the culture of Western civilisation. More specifically, it showcased the crucial role played by Eliot’s hermetic conception of tradition as he struggled in the midst of psychological, sexual and spiritual traumas to give poetic shape to profound and disquieting experiences.

It also exemplifies the vital importance of these traditions as creative writers draw upon them as they strive to come to grips with such experiences, while emphasising how dangerous are the iconoclastic forces that presently seek to discredit and “cancel” this incredibly rich heritage, suppressing and wiping it away, as if a culturally lobotomised Western civilisation is going to produce anything other than a new wasteland incapable of responding creatively to the multi-hued challenges of life.

The Waste Land draws on innumerable traditional sources, as Eliot makes clear in his notes to the poem. Amongst the major influences were J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890 to 1922) and, more importantly, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920). Weston’s theory—that the Grail ritual at the centre of the Arthurian mythos had its origins in an ancient fertility cult—was accepted as the authoritative account of the origins and meaning of the Holy Grail at the time and had a particular influence on literature and the visual arts. About Weston, Eliot declared in the very first note to The Waste Land, that:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance. Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can; and I would recommend it.

Thirty-five years after The Waste Land appeared, Eliot retreated from his endorsement of Weston’s book as a primary key to the poem. This was perhaps because Weston’s theory had fallen out of favour, but also because Eliot wanted to draw a veil across the extent to which The Waste Land reflected the often intolerable and humiliating misery of his first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood. (A recent biography—Lyndall Gordon, The Hyacinth Girl—observes that Eliot wanted to “obliterate Vivienne” from his past.) This essay will, however, follow Eliot’s initial guidance and explore the role played in The Waste Land by the Grail legend as a case study of how he gave form and content to his deeply personal vision by drawing on the multivalent resources of a tradition that extends back some nine hundred years and beyond.

It appears Eliot married Vivienne for several reasons: he had been rebuffed by his first love; was recoiling from the loss in the war of a very close friend; wanted to confirm his independence from his parents; and needed a rationale for remaining in England, discontinuing his philosophy studies and turning to poetry. Vivienne was a petite, ethereal and attractive young woman whom Aldous Huxley described as “an incarnate provocation”. However, she suffered from various physical and mental ailments, the full extent of which were not disclosed to Eliot until after their marriage, but which eventually led to her involuntary confinement in an asylum. These ailments included: childhood tuberculosis, colitis, dental complaints, exhaustion, eye problems, fever, insomnia, intestinal inflammation, laryngitis, menstrual problems, mental strain, migraines, mood swings, nervous complaints, neuralgia, paranoia, phobias and rheumatism. That Vivienne made manipulative use of her illnesses is well documented, as have been the sexual difficulties the couple faced, along with Eliot’s tendency to blame himself for the situation. This pressure led him into long periods of what he called “aboulie”, extreme listlessness, depression, the loss of will, and an incapacity to carry out important tasks. Eventually, Eliot suffered a mental breakdown and spent time in a Lausanne sanitorium, where he worked on The Waste Land.

One source of Eliot’s debilitating condition may have been the double inguinal hernia with which he had been born, which required him to wear a truss for most of his life and also face surgery, including around the time The Waste Land was published. By then Vivienne had taken to calling her husband “my dearest Wonkypenky” and, as Robert Crawford notes (in Young Eliot, 2015), this “intimate physical trouble may have intensified a wider sense of woundedness within the Eliots’ marriage, and may even have quickened Tom’s imaginative interest in Jessie Weston’s Fisher King”, the mythic monarch whose wound to his groin rendered his realm a wasteland, as will be discussed shortly.

Recognition that The Waste Land reflected this fraught domestic situation emerged immediately upon its appearance, as Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary as the rumour circulated that “Tears Eliot” was in a “precarious psychological state” and was contemplating suicide (Robert Crawford, Eliot after The Waste Land, 2022). Meanwhile, Eliot was describing his married life as like living in a Dostoevsky novel, a view echoed by Bertrand Russell, who said of Vivienne that she had “impulses of cruelty” towards Eliot, “a Dostoevskian type of cruelty”. Eliot later confided to his brother that his first marriage was “in some respects the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive”. Eliot also confessed to a friend that he “never lay with a woman he liked, loved or was strongly attracted to physically”.

Indeed, one of Eliot’s leading biographers observes that Vivienne “shared, endorsed and perhaps prompted extreme feelings of what Eliot called ‘hatred of life’ … Eliot claimed that hatred of life amounted to a kind of vision like a biblical warning of a Gomorrah doomed for corruption and licentiousness” (The Hyacinth Girl). And F.R. Leavis detects in The Waste Land “the fear [that is] partly the fear of death, but still more a nameless, ultimate fear, a horror of the completely negative” (New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932). Moreover, in Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996), Ray Monk goes into extended forensic detail about Vivienne’s affair with Russell, entered into shortly after her marriage to Eliot, and the intense humiliation it caused her cuckolded husband.

Whatever the reasons might have been for Eliot’s later denial, Weston’s book gave The Waste Land a lot of its power as Eliot strove to come to grips poetically with his dreadful situation. It also provides a case study in the way in which the Western tradition offers resources that can be called upon to give expression to profound insights and emotions. After all, despite its contemporary “disneyfication”, the Grail is a core component of the vast Arthurian literary tradition, with its themes of love, honour, shame, birth, death, loss, grief, betrayal, sacrifice, deceit, redemption, destiny, heroism, questing, adventure, gallantry, rivalry and so on, stretching back almost a millennium.

Drawing on such resources, Eliot composed his own Modernist version of a world stripped of honour and renown. As George Williamson observes in A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot (1979): “The most important idea for Eliot in Miss Weston’s scheme was that the Grail story subsumes a number of myths; this provided him with both a central myth and a basic system of metaphor.” And it was through this that Eliot brought together “a wealth of allusion that allowed him to contrast the rich intellectual and emotional life of past ages with the sterile and passionless people of the present” (Alan Lupack, The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend).

This debt was recognised immediately at the time—for example, by Edmund Wilson in his review (“The Poetry of Drouth”, The Dial, October 1922): “Miss Weston’s interpretation of the Grail Legend lent itself with peculiar aptness to Mr Eliot’s extraordinary complex mind.” Wilson also provided an excellent synopsis of the relevant sections of From Ritual to Romance. The key conception there is the plight of the “Fisher King”, the ruler wounded in the groin, possibly for some sexual transgression, and cursed with an impotence that spread like a miasma across his realm, making it a lifeless, sterile and wasted land.

Rendered virtually immobile, the accursed king whiles away his time fishing (see the end of The Waste Land: “I sat upon the shore, / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me”), as he awaits the Grail Knight who will free him from the curse by being inspired to ask the right question at the right moment. Wilson described with considerable insight how Eliot used Weston’s Grail scenario “as the concrete image of a spiritual drouth. His poem takes place half in the real world, the world of contemporary London; and half in a haunted wilderness, the Waste Land of the medieval legend.” Similarly, the cursed desolation festers not only in the physical and social world, but most importantly in “the hero’s arid soul”.

Seeking to grasp and express the origins and nature of this aridity, Eliot’s poem ranges across a vast network of allusion, through history, literature, mythology and religion, and from this bleak pilgrimage, the poet learns that, as Wilson tells us, “Not only is life sterile and futile, but men have tasted its sterility and futility a thousand times before. T.S. Eliot, walking the desert of London, feels profoundly that the desert has always been there.”

Here we come to the one great crucial innovation that Eliot introduces into the Grail tradition. The Waste Land depicts a nihilistic “anti-quest”: the Grail Knight’s mission is abortive, the king isn’t saved, the land is not redeemed, sterility and futility reign. Stephen Spender in his excellent study (Eliot, 1975) makes a similar point in his discussion of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Prufrock is a searcher, and his quest, like that of other individuals in Eliot’s poems, is for a grail. The grail, however, is fantasy, artefact, not the real supernatural.” The objects of Eliot’s quest dissolve into “false grails”. There is no hope.

Eliot’s use of the Grail legend and other traditional resources to illuminate the bleak cultural and personal realm in which he found himself made The Waste Land legendary for its innumerable quotations and allusions. Some critics questioned this: Conrad Aiken in “An Anatomy of Melancholy” (1923) worried that this risked producing a “literature of literature”, as if Eliot had concluded that the poetry of Modernism required “a very complex and very literary awareness able to speak only, or best, in terms of the literary past” from which, paradoxically, it was trying to tear itself free. On the other hand, these allusions both enrich and give some coherence to a long poem that otherwise offers many challenges to the reader.

This enrichment and coherence arise out of the way in which Eliot relates to tradition, and this was illuminated by his well-known essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). In that work, Eliot championed a conception of tradition to which the poet relates as a vehicle, a mediator and, literally, as a catalyst, serving to synthesise and transmute elements from the tradition into new work. This doesn’t involve the unimaginative “handing down” of previous work. On the contrary, “tradition is a matter of much wider significance” and carries a great deal of cultural weight. Moreover, it cannot simply be inherited or its riches passively acquired; rather, “if you want it you must obtain it by great labour”. This involves the acquisition of “the historical sense [and] a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” in the life of the writer:

a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer, and within it the whole of the literature of his own country, has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

Eliot was well positioned to acquire and nurture this historical sense, being exceptionally well-read. Indeed, he had pursued philosophical studies up to doctoral level before turning to poetry, becoming sceptical about the capacity of merely conceptual intelligence fully to grasp reality. Poetry, on the other hand, could reach beyond merely intellectual concepts, and had the capacity more fully to grasp and express the totality of human experience, especially the traumas and challenges he was facing at the time.

Eliot had a holistic and organic sense of the tradition. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, he affirms “the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and … the conception of poetry as a living whole, of all the poetry that has ever been written”. He emphasises that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” that preceded him in the literary or artistic traditions. Eliot then goes on to offer an inspiring, quasi-mystical vision of how traditions evolve:

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments [of the tradition] form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new … work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

To see this dependence upon tradition as merely burdensome is to misunderstand both the nature of tradition and the sense of history that is required: it is not the weight of knowledge that is crucial for the true poet (or his readers), but a sensibility and an empathetic feeling for the past and the tradition it embodies. As Eliot explains: “What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.” The goal is to become “a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” and so produce works of true profundity.

In connection with this holistic conception of tradition and the poet’s relation to it, it is also worth noting Spender’s view that Eliot’s desire for immersion in a greater whole was a key characteristic of his work: “In all his work there is the search for the merging of individual consciousness within some wider objective truth—at first the tradition, next the idea of the supernatural, and finally the dogmas of the Catholic Church (Eliot considered the Church of England to be Catholic).”

In confronting this almost transcendent task, The Waste Land serves as an incredibly rich case study in the use of allusion in poetry writing at this level. Only some examples can be cited here. The process begins at the very beginning, not only with the adoption from the Grail legend of its title, but also with its epigraph. This records the prophetess, Sibyl, responding to the question, “What do you want?” with “I want to die.” This epigraph replaced Eliot’s first choice, taken from the final section of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness: “The horror! The horror!”

It appears Eliot was determined from the outset to signal the pervasive bleakness of his poem, and he was relying on such allusions to accomplish this. That the mood was meant to be very grim becomes even more evident when it is recalled that the reason for Sibyl’s death-wish was that she had been confined to a jar because her body threatened to deliquesce; she had asked Apollo to be granted as many years of life as there are grains in a handful of sand, but she had forgotten to ask for eternal youthfulness as well. She was therefore condemned to a hideous purgatory of endless decay, and it was to this that Eliot chose to allude at the very outset of his poem.

These grim allusions continue with the title of the poem’s first section, “The Burial of the Dead”, which is the title of the burial service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. They continue with references to the “Son of Man” and his Crucifixion, and to Ecclesiastes (12:5–8) where “fears shall be in the way … desire shall fail … the mourners go about the streets”, and it is discovered that “all is vanity”. Amongst other early bleak allusions are quotations in German from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde concerning ill-fated marriages and the unrequited longing of a dying Tristan for Isolde, characters that also belong to the Arthurian mythos.

Eliot invokes a similar association in Part III, when he quotes, in French, the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s sonnet “Parsifal” from Amour (1888). This largely paraphrases Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal (1877). Also derived from the Arthurian mythos, it recounts how the knight resists the allure of female flesh, vanquishes Hell, restores the ailing Fisher King, and kneels in adoration before the Holy Grail, having become its priest. Eliot’s quoted line: “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” (“And oh those children’s voices singing in the dome!”) refers to the end of the opera in which the dome of the Grail Castle fills with heavenly voices as Parsifal unveils and raises high the Holy Grail.

In this allusive fashion, Eliot juxtaposes the sacred with the profane; the nobility of the Grail Knight and his salvific mission with the carnality of the young man carbuncular and his graceless conquest, which is described almost immediately in the following lines. And given the asymmetry of the respective accounts—the prurient receives thirty-four lines (lines 222 to 256) while the sacred is merely alluded to (line 202)—it seems that Eliot had at the time the enervating and spiritually demoralising sense that in his world the sacred has receded and it is the profane that rules: that ours is a realm of rutting couples, not exultant Grail Knights.

Such passages exemplify Eliot’s use of juxtaposition, which brought incongruous elements or scenarios (for example, the sacred and the profane) into collision in order to dislocate the reader from an accustomed position and so generate new insights. Years later, Eliot recalled that it had been from Charles Baudelaire that he “learned first [of] the poetical possibilities … of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic”. Eliot himself provided the most brilliant example of this at the start of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table”.

Returning to Part I, we find “Madame Sosostris” dealing a sequence of cards to an unknown recipient (there is no single protagonist in The Waste Land). Some of these are real Tarot cards but others were conjured up by Eliot, as he acknowledges in his notes to the poem, which also further confirms the association of the work with characters from the Grail Legend:

I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V [that is, the crucified and resurrected Christ]. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the “crowds of people”, and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

And so, in some twenty lines of poetry there are allusions to the New Testament account (Luke 24:13–35) of the two disciples who encounter the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus, but fail to recognise him; and also once again to From Ritual to Romance, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and to Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks and Mona Lisa. The latter in turn evokes Walter Pater’s famous ekphrastic description in The Renaissance (1877), where Pater opines, inter alia, that “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas.” A leading figure in the Aesthetic Movement, Pater’s use of allusion was nearly as central to his work as it was to Eliot’s.

Many other examples of this technique can be cited, especially those that allude to catastrophe or doomed love or illicit sex. For example, “V. What the Thunder Said” invokes “Falling towers”, a reference to one of the most important Tarot cards invoked by Weston, as Eliot explains in his notes. This is “the Tower”, which signifies unforeseen ruin, misery, distress, adversity, calamity, disgrace and deception. A dozen lines further on, there appears the Chapel Perilous, to which Weston devotes an entire chapter. To enter there is to risk death, perhaps at the hands of a sorceress practised in the arts of seduction, but The Waste Land’s authorial voice assures us that “Dry bones can harm no one”.

The seduction theme is evoked also in the title of “II. A Game of Chess”. This alludes to a play by Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (1657), in which a young wife is seduced while her mother-in-law is distracted playing chess. Later, towards the end of “V. What the Thunder Said” there are the lines: “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract”. These refer to the lament of the adulteress, Francesca da Rimini, who recounts her sad tale to Dante in the Second Circle of Hell, in Canto 5 of the Inferno, a scenario that has inspired some of the greatest works of art in the Western tradition. She and her lover Paolo are doomed to be buffeted for all eternity by the whirling winds of lust after surrendering to their passions while sitting together reading a romance about Lancelot. There is therefore a secondary allusion here: as those familiar with the Arthurian mythos would know, this trusted knight’s illicit dalliance with his Queen Guinevere brought only catastrophe to their realm and meant that Lancelot could never fulfil his destiny to be the Grail Knight.

In The Waste Land, Eliot was seeking to communicate a sense of profound, even ontological, bleakness that he felt was pervasive throughout the world and personal relationships. In doing so he operated poetically on two levels: at the more immediately apparent, exoteric level of the poetic language and structure of the work itself; and at the subtextual, esoteric level of multivalent allusion. And to do this he drew copiously upon the vast reservoir of traditional resources with which he had laboriously and lovingly made himself familiar, exemplified in this poem by the use he made of the Grail legend.

Mervyn Bendle contributed “The Meaning of the Quest for the Holy Grail” in the January-February issue. In 2022 he wrote a seven-part series for Quadrant on the discoveries and implications of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library.