YuLi
Introduction
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is praised as the landmark of modernist poetry in English world. It was written in 1921 when Eliot was “a convalescent preoccupied partly with the ruin of post-war Europe, partly with his own health and the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London, partly with a hardly exorable apprehension that two thousand years of European continuity had for the first time run dry”. ① The conditions in which Eliot composed the poetry determined that it would be complicated and bewildering, which is the common comments reached by critics. It is true that it is its symbolic language, its mosaic-like technique, and its apparatus of erudite allusion that forms the bewilderment of this poetry. However, what is more important is that “Eliot took less than five hundred lines to evoke a panorama of civilization from the earliest time till the present day.”②
The Waste Land is in nature an enigma. This is mainly caused partly at least by its 50 annotated references and other incidental allusions, its quotations in 7 different languages, its elliptical phrasing and its subtle rhythms. Among the various interpretations of the poem is one with Eliot’s criticism in support of his poems. The representatives holding this method include Leavis, Matthiessen, and George Williamson. They believed that Eliot practiced these principles in his poems. Their work bore fruit and was regarded as the ‘great contribution of the votaries of the “whole
ness” of Eliot’.Hugh Rosd Williamson，The Poetry of T.S.Eliot，New York：G.P.Putnam’s Sons，1933，p85. No doubt, they provided the reader with an illuminating way to access The Waste Land since Eliot was among the most influential critics of his age; his critical ideas were treated as the guide ideology of the modernist poets. Further more, Eliot himself claimed that “what he writes about poetry, …, must be assessed in relation to the poetry he writes.”T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1956, p26.The Waste Land as the most distinctive achievement of the modern poetry was quite necessary to reflect these ideas.
Principal Ideas in Eliot’s literary Criticism
Eliot’s criticism urged a program of the classic, tradition, and impersonality. It has been accepted that tradition is the banner of Eliot’s literary criticism, under which we have tradition itself and some other concepts of impersonality and objective correlative.
Tradition Eliot first propounded the importance of tradition in the literary criticism in 1919 in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. The focus in his tradition is the “historical sense” which
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with 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 compels a simultaneous order. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1975, p14.
Obviously, history to Eliot is the reference and mirror of the present. It insinuates the future of the human world. “The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.” ibid p16. From Eliot’s viewpoints on tradition, we can understand why Eliot stressed the significance of classics in literature. According to Eliot, a classic must be the work of a mature mind while maturity of mind develops against history. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1956, p55, p61. “A mature literature, therefore has a history behind it: a history, that is not merely a chronicle, an accumulation of manus and writings of this kind and that, but an ordered though unconscious progress of a language to realize its own potentialities within its own limitations. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1956, p56. In other words, for the modern poets, there exists a literature they cannot escape, and they should maintain two things: “a pride in what our literature has already accomplished, and a belief in what it may still accomplish in the future.”ibid p65. Furthermore, the modern poet must treat tradition in the light of future. Otherwise, the tradition would become a dead one. All these can explain why Eliot held that a genuine poet must be aware of his predecessors and regard them as the most important source of their creation.
Due to the dense history complex, Eliot not only advocated that the poet must root himself in tradition but also insisted that whether it fits in tradition is a test of the value of the work of art. Eliot’s historical sense or his history complex finds a full display in The Waste Land. He dislocated the historic images to reflect the conditions today. And for the same reason, Eliot excluded the poets of so called “originality” from the group of genuine and great poets.
Impersonality In his comments on Johnson’s achievement as a critic and as a poet, Eliot expressed his critical ideas about “originality”. For him, originality, as a kind of thought and expression, “does not have to be novel or difficult of apprehension and acceptance”. “Originality does not require the rejection of convention,” And originality “may cease to be a virtue at all” if it “becomes the only, or the most prized virtue of poetry”. ibid p182. From these remarks we can see that Eliot was persistent in driving away personal feelings and emotions from poetry. Actually his refusal of treating originality as the major norm for poetry is the repetition of his idea of impersonality advocated in 1919.