Weavers, poets and magicians: un/mapping The Waste Land

Abstract

This paper aims at reading T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land as a living mandala of voices and symbols. Therefore the dynamics of the mandala principle is introduced and explained in order to provide a structural and structured way of looking at the text. This dynamics is also used to relate the poetic voice that stands in the middle of the poem-mandala to its peripheral display of words. The poet, who is compared with a weaver and a magician, is identified as well with “The Hanged Man,” a symbolic expression of change and transformation that can be seen as the silent axis of the whole poem.