View source for Imperialism in The Waste Land

(''Working title'')

(This article is a work in progress, seeking to examine the significance of space in ''The Waste Land'', especially in regards to imperialism and the regeneration of the British Empire and/or Europe as a whole.)

What has really caught my eye in this project is the scope of the map, the distances.  While a good deal of The Waste Land takes place in a fairly concentrated area of London, the poem actually has quite a scope, reaching into northern Africa, all over Europe, and into the western skirts of Asia.  Most interestingly of all, though, is the fact that the final stanzas of the poem take place far removed from the rest of the points, in India.  Dealing with a poem about sterility and a dead generation nested among corpses, the shift towards a sort of eastern religious or philosophical serenity seems very much like a reinfusion of life, a breath of fresh air, a revival.  

Imperialism has an overbearing ring and an even harsher connotation in our day and age.  We treasure diversity, and even more importantly, we take very seriously our responsibility to speak for the abuses, the oppressions, and the offenses of our ancestors.  Where imperialism was once seen as a divine appointment, a sovereign duty for an advanced, powerful nation to spread its civilization, its culture, and its laws, today it has become a byword and an insult.  An imperialist is labeled intolerant, bigoted, arrogant.  And why shouldn't he be?  He advocates his own beliefs, invades the spaces of others in order to impose his own systems.  Imperialism, in this sense, for the most part deserves its reputation.

However, The Waste Land seems to introduce and even advocate a sort of imperialism, in that Eliot finds himself pacing through the deadened landscapes of his own London, the throne rooms and ruins of Europe and the Mediterranean, and finds himself eventually seeking a land even further away, on the outskirts of the British Empire, in order to coax forth a new meaning and a new life for his war-torn country.