- Hello, I'm Victor Strandberg and I'm here for another session in our studies of the
poetry of T.S. Eliot. In this session we're going to take up a preliminary context for The Waste Land. I try to minimize this sort of thing, but we really do need this background before we can launch into the poem proper, to understand some of the
sources and influences that went into the making
of this celebrated poem, the most influential poem in English in the 20th century. I'm going to begin with some allusions that went into The Waste Land. We recall that T.S. Eliot called himself a classicist in literature. And what this seemed to mean in practice is that T.S. Eliot
ransacked the literatures of the past in various languages, he was genuinely multicultural, in order to find fragments that are still living and vital and useful and valuable in our own time in this modern world. We could begin with the
allusions to classical antiquity. This would include reference to the Aeneid of Virgil, the great epic of the Roman Empire in its heyday, a poem that was also a tribute
to the Emperor Augustus. We conclude the satiric on Petronius that showed the Roman
Empire still at its height, but in a state of decadence. This work was written a generation or so after the crucifixion of Jesus. And we would have to
include in these allusions to antiquity, a vital importance were his references to sacred writ. I would cite three things in particular. The Upanishads and Vedas
of ancient Hindu worship, the references to the Buddha and Buddhism. Part four of The Waste Land
is called The Fire Sermon, named after the Buddha's own fire sermon delivered to his monks. When we get to part four we will have a closer look at the Buddha's fire sermon. And we have references to the Christian and Hebrew Bible, the
Old and New Testaments. References to the Gospels, references to the Old Testament prophets, and to other writings in the Holy Bible. Now these writings of sacred writ have a special significance
in The Waste Land. They represent this ongoing structure. In Eliot's verse, a poetry
has a quarrel with oneself. Or as Faulkner put it, the
heart in conflict with itself. In Eliot's case, this
poem continues the ongoing conflict between a naturalistic intellect that tells him this is
the way the world is. We have to live with it. And this yearning for something better, which I think we could associate with Eliot's religious sensibility undermining to some degree or at least in combat with the naturalistic
intellect of the poet. Other sources or allusions
from more recent times would include Shakespeare. T.S. Eliot cites Hamlet, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. There are references to Dante, particularly the Inferno. And Eliot did claim that
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world, there is no third. There are references to the
French symbolist writers that I've referred to in earlier lectures, particularly to Baudelaire. Charles Baudelaire, around 1850, published The Flowers of Evil in which he portrayed the city of Paris as a sort of hell for our own time. Eliot was much impressed by that imagery and used it to create his city of London around the year 1920 in a similar mold as Baudelaire's Paris. There's also some reference and certainly some influence of Ezra Pound as a poet who influenced the formative years of T.S. Eliot in matters of style and form. There is reference to Charles Dickens in The Waste Land. The original title of this poem was He Do the Police in Different Voices, a citation from one of Dickens' novels. And there are very important uses of music in The Waste Land. There is reference to popular music. I think the most powerful musical allusion is to Richard Wagner's
great opera of erotic love Tristan and Isolde. An opera that T.S. Eliot attended with his friend Jean Verdenal
before World War I. Now of the allusions in The Waste Land, I think the most important or certainly ranking with the most important would be T.S. Eliot's
studies in anthropology, here defined particularly
as his ransacking of what in modern times might be referred to as primitive religions. I'm going to quote what Eliot said in his notes to The Waste Land for this source of
allusions, anthropology. In the first edition of The Waste Land there were no notes, and Eliot came to realize that his readers simply had to have more information in order to understand the poem. So in all subsequent
editions of The Waste Land he added these notes which indeed are extremely useful in helping
us understand the poem, I would say essential, and which became part of the poem The Waste Land in later editions. The very first note of these notes to The Waste Land, indeed the first sentence of these notes reads as follows: "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," the search for the Holy Grail, the name of the book
"From Ritual to Romance." In addition this first
note to The Waste Land gives credit to another
source of allusions. I read his statement as follows. "To another work of anthropology
I am indebted in general, "one which has influenced
our generation profoundly. "I mean The Golden Bough. "I have used especially the two volumes "Adonis, Attis, Osiris." Now I'm going to read what T.S. Eliot said about The Golden Bough, this immense collection of
anthropological studies. It was directed by Sir James Frazer, who compiled the work of scores of other anthropologists studying
primitive religions in these many volumes of The Golden Bough. About that master work, T.S. Eliot said the following in a letter he wrote to The Dial magazine in November 1921, a time when he was busy
writing The Waste Land. He said this: "The Golden Bough can be read two ways: "as a collection of
entertaining myths or," Eliot's way, "as a revelation
of that vanished mind "of which ours is a continuation." Which is to say he hoped to find in these primitive religions the genesis of the religious
sensibility in humankind. Perhaps if he could tap into that, he could bring forward some vital segments of religious thinking, religious experience, that would be valid in our own time, even in this naturalistic environment. We'll turn now to Jessie Weston's book, From Ritual to Romance. Miss Weston was one of the anthropologists who helped Sir James Frazer when he was assembling The Golden Bough. But she went her own way with this book, From Ritual to Romance. I hold up a copy here. This book was written about a single myth from antiquity. The search for the Holy Grail. Now most of us think of
that as a Christian myth. The Holy Grail, after all, was the cup used by
Jesus in his last supper and it became the object of much attention in the King Arthur legends
of the Middle Ages. For Jessie Weston, as she dug into the story of the Holy Grail, the Holy Grail turned out to be much older than Christianity. It goes back to remote antiquity where she describes its origins in these same primitive religions that prevailed in other
parts of The Golden Bough. I'm going to quote from
her table of contents where she described what goes on in each chapter of From Ritual to Romance. And I think the reason she has singled out this particular myth, the search for the Holy Grail as the center of her attention, the exclusive object of
her attention in this book, is because of an assertion
in this introductory chapter. Quoting what she says in
the introductory material: "Not death, but resurrection. "The essential center of ritual." Which is to say that the search for the Holy Grail is the search for a myth of rebirth. The most important myth in any society, whether it's traditionally
religious or secular and even naturalistic, and I'll explain that comment by pointing first to of
course the traditional religious connection to the
search for the Holy Grail. We think of the Holy
Grail in Christian terms as Jesus' cup at the Last Supper, leading to his death and resurrection, providing rebirth for all his followers. In secular terms, that
supernatural intervention is no longer possible. But even so, the
ideologies of modern times have promised a kind of rebirth for the followers of those ideologies. I refer particularly to Marxism as we looked at it in Gerontion, the march of history. Marxism, Bolshevism,
Fascism and the others offered the chance to enlist one's life in the building of a better society, aiming really towards a perfect society. And this could afford a meaningful life even in a naturalistic world. Some kind of myth of rebirth needs to be necessary for any society to have a meaningful existence. That is why the Holy Grail seemed to be so important to Miss
Weston and to T.S. Eliot as he read this book. My own impression is that T.S. Eliot, as the editor of the Criterion magazine for about 20 years from
1919 until World War II ended it in 1939, T.S. Eliot's role as editor meant that he got to review many books
written by other people, and among them was this book From Ritual to Romance, which I believe transformed this poem he was working on from He Do the Police in Different Voices to The Waste Land. That title comes from this book. In chapter two of Jessie Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, the subtitle is The Task of the Hero. She goes on and explains
that the task of the hero, searching for the Holy Grail, is the healing of the Fisher King and the removal of the curse from the wasteland. The Fisher King in these
legends from antiquity has been wounded in a way
that obliterates his fertility and thereby the entire kingdom has lapsed into a wasteland. They are waiting for a hero
to come to the wasteland and by asking the right questions he will heal the king,
restore his fertility, and thereby make the
entire wasteland fertile. As we move on in Jessie Weston's book, chapter three is called
The Freeing of the Waters. Here she goes back to
ancient Hindu sacred writ, the Rigveda, and in her language, "The extreme importance
assigned to Indra's feat "of 'Freeing the Waters.'" Which is to say every spring the god Indra arranges the coming of the monsoons necessary for life in
that part of the world. In part five of The Waste Land we will have a few drops of rain as people wait in that very
drought-ridden environment. Chapter four of Jessie Weston's book, Tammuz and Adonis is the subtitle, describes Tammuz as the earliest known representative of the dying god, the sacrificial god, a scapegoat, providing life for his
people by his own death. A later version of this myth is Adonis, and of course eventually we come to Jesus filling the same role of sacrificial death to bring life to his people. I move to chapter nine, The Fisher King. There is some such
figure in The Waste Land. In part five I sat fishing
on the shore and so forth. And Jesus is described
as a sort of Fisher King. "I will make you fishers of men," he told his disciples. The fish became the symbol
of the Christian faith for centuries before
the cross displaced it. In this chapter nine The Fisher King, Jessie Weston explains that
the fish is a life symbol. She goes back to ancient India where the god Vishnu appeared
in the form of a fish to help his people. She describes use of the fish in Buddhism. And of course she mentions the Messianic fish meal adopted by Christianity. The last chapter of From Ritual to Romance is called The Perilous Chapel. And this refers to the knight's quest for the Holy Grail, bringing him into close
contact with death. In chapter, excuse me, in part five of the The Waste Land we get something of this Chapel Perilous in the form of the empty chapel. It's a gutted ruin now. It's empty because the lack of faith in The Waste Land means that the chapel represents a faith no longer believed in. Nonetheless it is there, perhaps waiting to be revived eventually via the
conversion of T.S. Eliot. I'm going to quote now from the very last paragraph of Jessie Weston's book about the search for the Holy Grail, which I think we could understand as a search for a myth of rebirth that any society needs and which is lacking in Eliot's Wasteland. A reason why it is a wasteland. This is what Jessie
Weston says as her final commentary in this book. "Of this one thing we may be sure, "the Grail is a living
force, it will never die; "it may indeed sink out of
sight for centuries even, "and disappear from the
field of literature, "but it will rise to the surface again, "and become once more a
theme of vital inspiration "even as, after slumbering
from the days of Malory," the King Arthur stories, "it woke to new life in the 19th century, "making its fresh appeal
through the genius "of Tennyson," particularly in Idylls of the King, "and Wagner," that great composer. We could also add that the Holy Grail, of course, reappeared in the 20th century in the poetry of T.S. Eliot's. Now I want to close with
a look at some of the symbols that T.S. Eliot
derived from this book, which he used in The Waste Land. And the symbols I'm
thinking of are in this deck of cards, the tarot pack, which Jessie Weston describes in her book. This is a deck of cards. There were 78 cards originally. It emerged through the Middle Ages, though its genesis really goes back thousands of years
before the time of Jesus in some form or other. The purpose of the tarot deck, as it originally was generated, was not to gamble, but
to predict the future. And I'm going to now hold up this set of cards from the tarot deck, which I hope to explain
individually in a moment. In the file that I've
included with these lectures there is this picture, which you can consult if you choose. The cards in the deck that Miss Weston describes in her book would include the search
for the Holy Grail. The knight sitting under a tree seeing a vision of the Grail as he tries to go in search of it. We have also in the
tarot deck this symbol, the man with three staves will show up in part one of The Waste Land. He is a merchant. He's looking out at the
sea where it appears that a ship carrying his merchandise, it's on its way. We have the tower in part five. You can see that there is a thunderstorm at work here, flashes of lightning. Something like the Chapel
Perilous in the middle of it. An image that will show up in part five of The Waste Land. We have here the hanged man, a very important symbol. In Denmark we had figures who were discovered in the peat bog who were preserved in the peat and found with ropes around their neck. They were obviously sacrifices, sacrificial scapegoats
for their community. Presumably their deaths bringing some sort of benefit, some extension of life,
perhaps, to the community. If this card comes up when you're hoping to have your fortune told, you are in very bad shape, and perhaps it is best that
we lay this aside quickly. The last two cards that
I want to show from the tarot deck would be this card, the wheel of fortune. It's important not because of the fortune, but because of the wheel, which T.S. Eliot considered the most fundamental design of nature, the wheel turning, whether it's planets going around the sun, the great galaxies wheeling around a great black hole at the center, or we could go from that macrocosmic view to our individual lives where the circulation
of blood in one's body represents the turning wheel of nature. He also revokes in this image the wheel of time turning, something vitally important throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry. There is one other image I'll hold up. This is called the world. It too features the shape of a wheel, the basic design of nature and a subject that he would take up as he goes on through to
the end of Four Quartets. Now I think this will suffice for our preliminary context of The Waste Land. In our next session we'll
go on with the poem itself.
