The Concept of Experience as Grounding for The Waste Land

Abstract

This essay tries to understand one shaping logic by which Anglo-American modernist poets distinguish themselves from their nineteenth century predecessors. Both William James and F.H. Bradley developed ways of thinking that did not divide experience into how subjects process objects. Instead there is, first, experience –an encounter with qualities of events. The mind imposes its interest either in experience, mainly mattering for the person, or for the state of the world it makes present. But for Eliot and the Modernists there was something beyond the person and so a call for impersonality as a potentially fuller, more immediate encounter with the world. Eliot’s concerns for immediate experience operate in The Waste Land primarily to shape how he treats events and voices. But by the end, he cannot but place interpretation against experience in regards to the Thunder. This prepares for Eliot’s separation of humanism from the ways faith requires direct experience.