Navigating Cultural Desolation: Exploring T.S. Eliot's Depiction of Anxiety and Fragmentation in The Waste Land

Abstract

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), a remarkable English literary figure, is best known for the depiction of his age in his literary works. In this regard, scholars suggest that he lived and wrote in “an age of anxiety” and this very “anxiety” is often attributed to “profound transformations in human modes of life” engendered by cultural and institutional practices of modern condition. In Eliot, one can easily sense this phenomenon particularly in his early poems. These poems are said to have embodied this “anxiety” with great depth. In this regard, The Waste Land considered as one of the representative poems of modernist English literature, captures the crisis and anxiety of his age provocatively. Here, he draws the picture of a cultural waste land of post war Europe where the traditional way of life was disintegrating through the decline of traditional values, authority and order. The waste-landers of Eliot, to a large extent, suffer from loss of faith, loss of social nature of personality that created fragmentations in their lives. In this paper, through a method of analytical understanding and interpretation of the poem The Waste Land relating to its social and historical contexts, we will make an understanding of it focusing nature and extent of cultural anxiety depicted by Eliot. Thus, our study would contribute further to clarify the Eliotic understanding of cultural anxiety in the context of modernity as depicted in The Waste Land.