Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The era of the spiritual wasteland as an undertone of English literature, to which T. S. Eliot gave a legend and a signature, is generally considered to denote the decade from 1920 to 1930, and to characterise the psychological disillusion and despair which followed the first World War. But in fact that disease of the spirit reaches far deeper into the national consciousness and history than the temporary reaction of sensitive individuals to the frightful experiences of twentieth-century warfare. The premonition of a civilization running down, of a nation exhausting itself into sterility, overshadows much of the poetry of the latter part of the nineteenth century. James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night and Fitzgerald’s English version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam both reflected in different facets the beginning of the break-up of the solid Victorian facade of morality and belief, before the onslaught of science and the hell-for-leather competition between the great industrial powers for domination of world markets. Matthew Arnold’s feeling of suspension between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born,” is still being echoed fifty years later by Cecil Day Lewis— "Only ghosts can live between two fires.”  

This poetic despair and disgust arose as much from a hatred and horror of the tasteless materialism of inflated industrial civilization as from the increasing isolation of the poet himself. His intellectual solitude, his sense of standing alone against the fraudulent and destructive values of a society geared to the mere acquisition of wealth, drove the poet back into the past, to the search for a more stable tradition, and the assertion of a purely aesthetic way of life.  

Already before 1914 those writers who were not floating upon the Indian summer lakes of the brief Edwardian prosperity were beginning to hear in the secret treaties of the Great Powers and the widespread popular unrest all over Europe rumours of war and catastrophe. In 1912, W. B. Yeats, emerging with a new, ascetic, and terrible grandeur from the faery shades of peasant Ireland, was writing:

“These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye:
The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,
Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
And discord follow upon unison,
And all things at one common level lie.”  

Perhaps it is not surprising that the voice of pessimism should speak with its driest and bitterest accent from America. On the one hand, her cultural ties, since the days of the French Revolution, had always been closer with France than with England, and in consequence her young writers fell more directly under the influence of Baudelaire and the French “flayers of the bourgeoisie”; and on the other, the unprecedented rate of development of American industry, the unchecked exploitation of its natural resources, the fantastic accumulation of individual wealth, exaggerated the vulgarity and inhumanity of its social standards. Young American poets and artists fled to Europe, to seek refuge in its older and more refined cultural tradition, only to discover the same economic mechanical pattern destroying and disintegrating that tradition.

“There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization"

So Ezra Pound, the ex-patriate American, summed up a conviction which many already held before the war began. And so also Eliot, who had come back from the New England to the old, expressed a disillusion, a conviction of the utter decay and sterility of society, which had not been forced upon him by the shock of war-experience, but which the material and psychological devastation of the war had only served to confirm.  

England emerged from the first World War impoverished and without a plan, but unwilling to admit it. She had lost her supremacy in shipping and steel: the change-over from war-time to peace-time production proceeded chaotically. Millions of men were demobilised into collapsing industries and unemployment. And there seemed to be no clear voice to sound a note of regeneration. Noisy and cynical flouting of all the old disciplines, the established code of morality, the traditional beliefs, and the hectic pursuit of ephemeral pleasures was the order of the day for those who could afford it. And for the rest, sinister and bewildered explosions of protest against the intolerable negation of their lives.

This situation Eliot, in the poem which has become the title-motif of the period, interpreted in terms of the medieval myth of the Fisher-King, the head and fountain of social vitality, who has gone sterile through an ancestral curse, and thereby induced impotence and sterility, not only in the community which he dominates, but even in the land itself upon which the community depends for its sustinence. By a subtle and erudite interplay of echoes and evocations from the culture of the past with colloquial modern instances, the poet conveys an almost nauseating impression of the gradual devaluation of all values, of the widening chasm between belief and action, thought and behaviour. In his world men have forgotten why they are alive, to what end they perform their mechanical actions. Eliot looks out upon a world of puppets—

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw"

who have lost all internal volition, and are completely at the mercy of external stimulus.  

“The world,” said D. H. Lawrence at this time, “is waiting for a great wave of regeneration, or a great wave of death.” Eliot was sure it was the latter. The Waste Land, in his poem, waited for water; but water has the double power of life and death, to rejuvenate the roots, or to drown. So that “What the Thunder Said” in the finale of his poem, is not only a promise of spiritual resurrection, the falling of the rain upon the land, but also the destruction of modern civilization as we know it—

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Civilization has reached the end of a cycle, must pass through a time of death before it is reborn into a new cycle; meanwhile, the only advice that Eliot can give to individuals is to “redeem the time” in spiritual contemplation.  

A parallel picture in prose was being painted by Aldous Huxley in his early novels, These Barren Leaves, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point.  

Meanwhile, over the face of England, the spiritual Waste Land had become a concrete actuality. Vast industrial areas, like the shipbuilding town ofJarrow and the Cumberland mining towns, lay derelict and dead. The new generation of young poets, led by XV. H. Auden, brought up in a landscape of—

“Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals,
Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails;
Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires;
Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires—”

began to look for social regeneration not so much in their inner spiritual selves or in some cyclic renewal of fertility, as in combined social action, and the setting of the domestic scene in order.  

Whatever the validity of their theories or their poetic practice, there is no doubt that the year 1930 does mark the end of a literary period in England, and the beginning of a new conception of the world in which literature is produced and of the function of literature in that world. Rain had come to the Waste Land, destructive of much in reverence for the past and appreciation for the abiding values of the present, but at least impulsive in a new direction.

“Stirring dull roots with spring rain.”