The City in Modern Poetry:
T. S. Eliot's London as a Wasteland
Bryan Boyce, Sophie Nye, Caitlin Skinner, Alyssa Yokota-Lewis
The London of the 1920s and 30s was a city of change--economically, politically, and socially. This tumultuous postwar environment was shared by many major Western European cities during the era, instigating the birth of a new age of literature and art: modernism. T.S. Eliot's poetry was influenced by modernist concepts, not excluding his literary portrayals of London and all modern cities as a waste land, this state being a result of industrialism and a splitting of society in its body and soul. The following analysis is intended to explore Eliot's perception of the modern city via an historic look at London, Eliot's place in the Modern canon, and a close reading of The Waste Land and other works he wrote during this time.
The London that T.S. Eliot inhabited in the early part of the 20th century was a city in transition. The 19th century had seen the city???s population and area expand to an unprecedented size. 960,000 people lived in London in 1801. In 1900 there were 6.5 million people. For the first part of the 20th century, London???s ???population was greater than those of Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and Moscow combined, greater than those of twenty-two of the next largest British cities and towns put together??? (White, 5).
Maps showing the growth of London during this period
Empire and industry added to the wealth of the city over the 19th century and changed its face. The Victorians obsessively modernized the fa??ade of the city and put in a sewer system to protect the Thames from waste. New, wide avenues cut swathes across the city; old buildings in the way were decimated. The Victorians also put in most of the large parks in London today. They built museums and galleries to display objects from around the empire.
Industry completely changed the landscape in the 19th century, altering even the quality of the air. In the slums of the East End, factories sprang up, and many poor workers were forced to labor in cramped conditions for long hours for very little pay. People desperate to get work at the docks, hazardous and unstable employment, would often wait for hours only to not be chosen for that day???s work crew. The middle classes moved out to the more private suburbs, and laid the foundations for a mass public transport system to shuttle them in and out of the city where the poor lived in overcrowded housing. Communality was replaced with compartmentalization of life with work and home separated, with a disconnection between the spheres for people who increasingly worked outside the home, separating producer from product and pride from work.
In the early 20th century, London???s growth rate slowed. The generation after the Victorians continued to beautify and change the city. Less housing was built than was destroyed in the process of remaking inner London into a commercial district. The middle classes continued to move en masse, and they needed easy transportation into the city. The underground electric tram became more popular and on the street above motor buses took off. At the same time, the large industrial center in the East End died down as industries moved out of town.
The city???s building projects were forced to stop during World War I as shortages of supplies of both food and materials hit Londonhard. After the war, construction picked up; however more commercial buildings than residential buildings were put up. The result was a depopulated city center as people moved out and business moved in. London was a city in transition that buzzed with activity during the day and was deserted at night, and where commercial and business interests were taking over, invading spaces that used to be reserved for homes. It was a city that housed those unable to move out in over-crowded quarters, while the middle classes lived further apart in the suburbs and further from where they worked, exacerbating the disconnection between home and work and between people themselves. This is the backdrop for the development of modernist thought.
Schools of modernist thought may be defined in terms of universality: those which embraced an underlying, deeply-rooted commonality to all of humanity???s culture, thought, or creative output, and those which did not (Surette 245). Writers, philosophers, academics, and artists of the former category being the more widely canonized, a universal approach to thought and creative activity can be seen as something of a modernist touchstone. It is present, in widely varied fashion, in the work of almost every well-known modernist writer, from the xenophobic terror of Joseph Conrad???s Heart of Darkness (the primary source of which is an intuitive perception of fundamental similarity among African and European peoples) to William Butler Yeats???s preoccupation with the occult and its belief in a world soul. Jung proposed spiritus mundi; Freud???s psychoanalysis was no less all-encompassing. Universality is, in fact, regarded by many as the key characteristic that separates modernism from the infinite subjectivity of its controversial descendant, postmodernism.
This is not to suggest that modernism was marked by any sort of collective consistency, but simply that most modern ideas, works, and artists fed off of their predecessors and contemporaries. Such heightened contextual awareness in an era of increased communication is an evidently important part of T.S. Eliot???s work, and an understanding of this helps both to place him in the modern canon and to establish an apt point of departure for exploring his fascination with the city.
Born into a distinguished family and educated first at a St. Louis and then a Boston area boarding school before attending Harvard University, Eliot was well on his way to becoming one of the most literate academics in American society before he reached his mid-20s. In addition to poetry, he devoted his intellectual efforts to literary criticism and the intense study of both predecessors (notably Dante, whose Inferno and Purgatorio creep into The Waste Land???s fragmented narrative in a more than cursory manner) and contemporaries, including the aforementioned Conrad and Yeats and confidant Ezra Pound, among others. Outside the realm of literature, Eliot was deeply intrigued by the study of mysticism and philosophy. By most accounts, it is this cultured, intellectually-attuned sense for Western literary and academic tradition and context that drew the young poet to Europe (first Paris and then, more permanently, London).
What Eliot experienced in London, of course, wasn???t exactly congruent with his romantic expectations. As mentioned, post-World War I Europe itself was something of bleak, disillusioning milieu, but this was coupled with a host of personal hardships for the poet, including an extendedly difficult marriage. While this was certainly a trying time and setting for Eliot, the disparity and despondency he saw in London???s streets and cityscape combined with his internal turmoil provided the perfect avenue to explore the nature of the modern world.
The Waste Land can be read as an admirable if futile refusal to depart from the modern idea of universality???a remarkably ambitious attempt to summon the disparate, fragmented shards of Eliot???s life, London, and human existence into some sort of cohesive whole. The result can be frustratingly difficult, but it is through this scattered inaccessibility that Eliot is able to most accurately convey his chaotic sense of urban modernity, and a close reading of key passages from The Waste Land helps to further illuminate this frame of reference.
The Waste Land combines Eliot???s intellectual experiences with his first-hand familiarity of a nine-to-five job; the result conveys the physical and moral decline he saw within a modern city. The monstrous task of analyzing Eliot???s view in this difficult work can be broken down into three approaches: an examination of Eliot???s first drafts, an understanding of the texts and art to which Eliot alludes throughout the poem, and a look at the images of London and their relationship to Eliot???s own experience.
(This online copy of the poem contains links/explanations for all of Eliot's allusions)
Before Ezra Pound got his hands on it, The Waste Land, especially Eliot???s initial drafts of the third section, ???The Fire Sermon,??? focused quite candidly on the London area; these earlier efforts therefore clarify Eliot???s opinion of urban life. One particular passage of ???The Fire Sermon??????later cut???directly addresses the city. The speaker cries ??????London, the swarming life you kill and breed,/Huddled between the concrete and the sky?????? (Kenner 28); thus Eliot???s view of urban existence includes overpopulation, birth into death, and annihilation of nature. He declares that this city knows ??????neither how to think, nor how to feel,?????? for its people, inundated with the ???noise??? and ???lights,??? are ??????bound upon the wheel?????? in a monotonous daily cycle (Kenner 28). Such an existence transforms them into machine-like, undead figures like that of the typist who allows herself to be used for an undesirable man???s sexual satisfaction (Eliot, line 222-248; Brooker 123-124). Based on this more straightforward city description, Eliot???s true feelings for urban modernity are grim indeed, boiling down to an existence outside of time where ???life??? is nothing but repetition of undesired action, a veritable hell. The original epigraph in fact used an excerpt about ???the horror??? of humanity from Joseph Conrad???s Heart of Darkness, a quote Eliot rightly found appropriate for the subsequent poem (Brooker 43-44).
For good reason, critics note the rich literary and cultural history woven into The Waste Land???s verse; the works Eliot chooses to include provide immense insight into his vision of the decadent modern city. He works prominently with Dante???s Inferno and Purgatorio, focusing on the same cantos cited by fellow poet James Thomson 50 years prior when the latter wrote about London???s ??????fierce nocturnal vigils,?????? and combines these ideas of a living hell with Baudelaire???s ???city of the daylight ghosts,??? a vision synonymous to the aforementioned first draft of ???The Fire Sermon??? (Crawford 41-47). Other allusions include everything from Shakespeare to nursery rhymes about London Bridge (427), and almost all of these exemplify humanity gone wrong, often due to lust or dysfunctional sexual relationships (Surette 271). Examples of this love antithesis are the story of Tereus and Philomela (lines 99-104), Antony and Cleopatra (line 77), and Marvell???s ???To His Coy Mistress??? (lines 185, 196). The original Buddhist fire sermon itself alludes to the notion that fiery thoughts gained through the senses and lit by passion, infatuation, sorrow, etc., can only be ???extinguished??? by perceiving and consequently avoiding them (Brooker 121). Indeed, most of Eliot???s allusions suggest the idea that one of the main reasons modern cities are a waste is their warped preoccupation with the sensual.
The fluid relationship between the ???Unreal City??? and London is not unfounded; the poem is full of tangible allusions to the city???a city that Eliot, as a resident, observed to be dismal and desolate. Though one should hesitate to consider The Waste Land autobiographical, Crawford points out that while writing it, Eliot lived in the heart of London, ???working weekdays in a City Bank, returning home at night to a difficult marriage??? (131), therefore his descriptions of the wasted landscape are accurate and detailed. ???City??? with a capitol C actually refers to London???s financial district equivalent to Wall Street (Day 286), a bustling symbol of modern capitalism and commercialism. The ???brown fog??? mentioned after each ???Unreal City??? (lines 60-61, 207-208) and the ???winter dawn??? were not uncommon sights with London???s smog-ridden air and short winter days (Day 287). Numerous references to the Thames, over which London Bridge falls, include its yearly signs of hedonism and disrespect for nature, namely ???empty bottles???cigarette ends??? (Eliot, lines 176-178), a phenomenon he no doubt witnessed firsthand. He also mentions several London streets which he would have walked with the ???identically black-clad hordes, pince-nez agleam and umbrellas brandished like antennae??? as they poured ???into or out of Underground tunnels and the vast anthills of banks??? (Day 287). With an outlook and experience like that seeping through the dreary lifelessness portrayed in The Waste Land, it is a wonder that a creative man like Eliot could put up with modern city life at all.
London, 1920s
T. S. Eliot was a poet writing during the age of modernism, but not one for the changes that modernism made on people and their connection with the city. To him, Modernism is represented by industrialism and industrialism is the cause of a separation between the general populace???s body and soul. The modern city is a waste land consisting of nothing but machinery, materialism, and a false understanding of one???s fellow human being. His dislike towards the modern city is evident in several of his poems. For example, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Four Quartets and After Strange Gods.
Eliot concerned himself with society???s apparent loss of their hold on traditions. He felt that, especially in urban cityscapes where industrialization had the strongest hold, people were turning more towards the power of the machine to navigate their lives than using their roots or traditions to feed true feeling into their actions and words. He first defines tradition in After Strange Gods:
What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ???the same people living in the same place.???
Then he voices his concern for the ???uprooting??? of society in The Waste Land: ???What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images?????? (Lines 19-22). As the poem progresses, the reader is constantly reminded of the presence of industrialism. For instance, ???Unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn??? (Lines 60-61). The brown fog is the pollution that was ever present in industrialized cities and the unreal city is the dissociated aura that the city underwent as a result of industrialism.
Such dissociation is a prevalent issue in Eliot???s poetry. To him, the modern city encouraged a splitting of the body and soul in the individuals of society and in society itself. He illustrates the body which is absent of its soul when he emphasizes the importance that society places on things like having tea and sitting about to ???visit and gossip,??? actions which are absent of any kind of true feeling or connectedness. What he seems to be proposing is a need to unify the body and soul through the transcendent notion of the oversoul, the idea that all people and their spirits are connected through a single power. Once society can grasp that concept, people can connect better with themselves and with others. This sense of all people living under one soul is illustrated in The Waste Land when all of the previous characters flow into one another and are finally brought together in the character of Tiresias:
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see at the violet hour, the evening hour that strives homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, the typist home at teatime, clear her breakfast, lights her stove, and lays out food in tins???I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs perceived the scene, and foretold the rest??? (Lines 218-229)
Eliot brings the concept of industrialism and society???s obsession with materialism together through his sarcasm about the importance that society places on division of property to illustrate the splitting of body and soul in Ash Wednesday:
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining we are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other, united in the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
For T.S. Eliot, the modern city represented a force that was steadily changing the city and the society that he had grown to appreciate as a romantic. Its focus on mindless machinery seemed to him to be leading the city into a waste land that he was not sure he could fix.
As demonstrated through a careful look at historical, literary, and philosophical foundations, Eliot considered the modern city to be a waste land due to the dehumanization and disconnectedness of everyday life. In reaction to the detrimental effects of industrialization on large European cities, Eliot and his modernist contemporaries used literature to convey these sentiments to a wide audience: to show society just where it had gone wrong.
Group Works Cited
