The Waste Land: Meaning and Multiplicity

Abstract

T.S. Eliot’s “stony rubbish ... / A heap of broken images” is often characterised as both The Waste Land’s theme, and the technique it employs to “connect” aspects of modernity. To read the poem from within the British twenty first century lyric tradition is to admire the way that such tessellation creates a literary whole. What lessons can be learnt for contemporary poetics, in an era characterised arguably less by a breakdown in meaning than by a multiplication of meanings: in the multiplying sources of authority offered by identity politics, or citizen journalism; in competing public discourses; in the ramifying identities one individual may acquire as they occupy a number of social or emotional roles? If the impulse of lyric poetry is to “sing” these into a kind of coherence, a unifying voice too often creates unifying perspective, is it possible that The Waste Land offers a counterexample?