Reading T.S. Eliot in our Ideological Age: Allusions to Christian Liturgy in The Waste Land

Abstract

Critics have long engaged in an ideological debate regarding T.S. Eliot’s antisemitism, misogyny, and ethnocentrism. While his opponents attack him according to deconstructionist readings, his proponents remain unsure about how to defend his place in literary studies. Upon the centennial of The Waste Land, I argue that its opening and closing allusions to Christian liturgical practice in “The Burial of the Dead” and “What the Thunder Said” offer a poetic defense against deconstructionism’s literary nihilism, a defense that justifies its place in the next century. Through these allusions, Eliot fashions a poetic ritual that enacts the Biblical and liturgical journey from death into new life, a journey reflected in the poem’s images of a barren modernity and its resurrection of tradition.