A major reinterpretation, T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land:
Exorcism of the Demons takes Eliot at his word in his reiterated
statements that The Waste Land was not a "criticism of the
contemporary world" but a personal "grouse against life." It is the
first critical work to investigate in depth the sources of the poem
in Eliot's life, with particular attention to Eliot's
"Calamus"-like attachment to a French youth during Eliot's graduate
year in Paris, his subsequent precipitate (and disastrous) marriage
following the death of his young French friend in World War I, and
his 1921 nervous breakdown (suffering from what he called "an
aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong
affliction") that led to the writing of The Waste Land. Yet the
main thrust of this work is not on Eliot's life, but on his poetry,
exploring ways in which the fragmentary details of his life shape
and illuminate the poems.
While some consideration is given to the early, confession-like
"Ode" (later suppressed), and to the famous "familiar compound
ghost" of the later Four Quartets, primary attention is focused on
the original drafts of The Waste Land. The poem emerges from a
meticulous and detailed reading of the manuscripts as indeed a kind
of elegy for a dead friend, with links to Tennyson's In Memoriam
and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and thus
not a piece of "social criticism" but an expression of anguish and
pain and despair working toward resignation, resolution, and
reconciliation.
It becomes clear that this interpretation is not dependent on
biographical conjecture and reconstruction, but flows inevitably
from simple close scrutiny of the intricate evolution of The Waste
Land; therefore the firm establishment of the full facts of Eliot's
early life is unnecessary to this "meaning." In following Eliot's
own frequent hints, this book offers a vital corrective to all the
previous readings (or misreadings) of The Waste Land, and has
important implications for the entire Modernist Movement.
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