"Eliot’s theme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs"

Passage from the book "T.S Eliot A Study of His Writings by Several Hands"

"The Waste Land: An Analysis"

Cleanth Brooks

We shall better understand why the form f the poem is right and inevitable if we compare Eliot’s theme to Dante’s and to Spenser’s. Eliot’s theme is not the statement of a faith held and agreed upon (Dante’s Divine Comedy) nor is it the projection of a ‘new’ system of beliefs (Spenser’s Faerie Queene). Eliot’s theme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs, known but now discredited. Dante did not have to ‘prove’ his statement; he could assume it and move within it about a poets business. Eliot does not care, like Spencer, to force the didactism. He prefers to stick to the poets business. But, unlike Dante, he cannot assume acceptance of the statement. A direct approach is calculated to elicit powerful ‘stock responses’ which will prevent the poems being read at all. Consequently, the only method prevent to work by indirection. The ‘Christian’ material is at the centre, but the poet never deals with it directly. The them of resurrection is made on the surface in terms of the fertility rites; the words which the thunder speaks are Sanskrit words.

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To put the matter in still other terms: the Christian terminology is for the poet here a mass of clichés. However ‘true’ he may feel the terms to be, he is still sensitive to the fact that they operate superficially as clichés, and his method of necessity must be a process of bringing them to life again. The method adopted in The Waste Land is thus violent and radical, but thoroughly necessary. For the renewing and vitalizing of symbols which have been crusted over with a distorting familiarity demands the type of organization which we have already commented on in discussing particular passages: the statement of surface similarities which are ironically revealed to be dissimilarities, and the association of apparently obvious dissimilarities which culminates in a later realization that the dissimilarities are only superficial – that the chains of likeness are in reality fundamental. In this way the statement of beliefs emerges through confusion and cynicism – not in spite of them.