The Waste Land

In groups, our class was assigned a theme to look for while reading T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. My group was assigned the theme of when love is lost, a waste land develops. As a group, we found several passages relating to sterility of man and land. The King Fisher tale is a story of a man who gets stabbed and becomes infertile due to his wound. Coincidentally, his land becomes infertile as well, so he has a knight go out in search of the Holy Grail in order to heal himself. The theme of infertility is present through images throughout the entire poem, where Eliot describes the landscape having brown fog, dried up water, infertile dirt, etc. I tried to understand why Eliot would write about this theme and the best explanation I could come up with was that the battlefields of World War 1 had become so polluted and chemically altered, that it became a wasteland not only geographically, but a wasteland for human life.

Frankly, after reading this poem I was so confused and frustrated from my lack of understanding that I tend to believe another take on it that I heard today. My professor asked the class if we thought that it was possible that T.S. Eliot wrote this poem as a joke, and its only intention was to force the reader to dive deeply into this extremely complex poem for no reason. Due to my lack of understanding, I naturally like and want to believe this take on the poem. I do think that Eliot had the ideas of loss of love, World War 1 and culture being destroyed and other serious themes in mind while writing it, but I think that he thought the whole situation was unfortunate so he wrote a satirical, nonsensical poem reflecting his thoughts on the issue. This theory that this poem is a joke is evident by the countless stories that are mentioned throughout the poem. No common person could possibly be so educated that they can understand Latin and be able to relate to and understand all of the different tales that he refers to. I think that he added his footnotes to make it so the reader has an idea of what Eliot is referring to, but I think that he included so many to make the poem so absurd that nobody would question the amount of work that he put into it. I could see a guy who thinks poorly of the great war writing a poem to his good friend, Ezra Pound, and collaborating on writing a great poem that will trump anyone who reads it. If T.S. Eliot's intentions were to write a poem so obscure that the readers would have such a difficult job understanding it, he accomplished his goal. I am so confused about this poem that I find it humorous that one of the most famous writers of the 20th century pulled a joke on me. If that were the case, I love this poem for its satirical intentions.