Dr Oliver Tearle, an English lecturer at Loughborough University, discusses the key themes within The Waste Land, the most prominent of which is the breakdown – the breakdown of marriages and relationships, psychological breakdowns, the breakdown of poetry and language, and even the breakdown of an entire world.

Essentially, the poem looks at the affect which the First World War has had on civilisation – the only escape of which, is death. It’s a sobering concept, and one which T.S. Eliot addresses by drawing upon lots of cultural references and shifting abruptly between speakers, locations and times – all of which work to create a unique and obscure poem.

Unsurprisingly, The Waste Land is considered by many to be the most influential poetical work of the Twentieth Century.

For more information on The Waste Land, take a look at our useful study guide here;
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Video transcript:

The Waste Land is a poem of breakdown - psychological breakdowns, a breakdown of marriages and relationships, of poetry and language, the breakdown even of an entire world. The carnage of the First World War had laid waste to Europe and made a mockery of the idea of civilization. After the war, Eliot's poem seems to ask, how can poetry respond to the mess the world has become? First published in 1922 The Waste Land is full of people sleepwalking through their daily lives the commuters travelling to work over London Bridge put the poem's speaker in mind of the swarms of tormented souls in hell.

Once the young typist has finished her unsatisfactory encounter with her acne face lover she simply smooths hair back and puts a record on - nothing to see here nothing gained, nothing. Life has become mechanical emptied of meaning, the epigraph from the Roman satirist Petronius which opens the poem tells of the Sybil from ancient Greek mythology who was doomed to eternal life but not eternal youth - trapped in her cage she prefigures all of the metaphorical prisoners of Eliot's poem when asked what she wants, the Sybil replies I want to die.

Elliot's poem is full of cultural references to other now long dead civilizations and their works of literature there are nods to ancient Greek myth to the age of Shakespeare in amongst the depictions of the modern world. At one point we found ourselves in London's East End in a pub where a woman is talking to a friend about a marriage and then suddenly we're back to Shakespeare again as a women are leaving the pub their speech merges with the words of Ophelia, that doomed Shakespearean heroin who went mad and drowned herself perhaps Elliot's poem seems to be saying death is the only real escape from the Waste Land.

The Waste Land presents a highly eloquent account of despair, its powerful vision of urban alienation spoke to a generation of young post-war readers and in doing so, it changed poetry forever. Eliot found a whole new language of poetry in the everyday world of motorcars and tinned food, jazz records, pub conversations, he complained that one of the first reviewers of the poem had over understood it, but really we're still seeking to understand it, we probably always will be. But then that's often the mark of a great work of literature like the characters in Eliot's poem, we can never truly leave the waste land behind.

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