TS Eliot lee “The Waste Land” ('La tierra baldía')

OPEN CULTURA.- The T.S. Eliot of the post-World War I period was a poet who stood Janus-faced on the threshold of old and new worlds. He looked backward to the mountain ranges of European tradition and marveled at their alpine peaks. At the same time, he seemed acutely aware of what a ridiculous figure he sometimes cut in his self-serious, pedantic veneration for the past. Eliot acknowledged the inexorable movement of time in poems like “The Waste Land,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and “The Hollow Men,” even if time only moved forward into chaos and mediocrity. When Eliot looked ahead, after the horrors of war and the increasing speed of modernization, what he saw was fragmentation, wreckage, and waste. I have heard his strategy in “The Waste Land” described as a “terminal aesthetic”—a beautifully destructive poetics, and one which could go no further.

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