Archival Evidence

A thorough investigation of every bit of content in either The Criterion or The Dial, let alone in both, would be an overwhelming task. Therefore, this particular project is most interested in finding obvious similarities in thematic content that can be gathered from brief exposure to each of the included pieces. The most apparent and most frequent shared themes include death and the First World War, fertility and sterility, and a kind of distrust in authority and Western culture. Often, it is difficult to separate one thematic element from another; they are tied together intertextually and intratextually between and in most of the pieces as much as they are in “The Waste Land.” It is worth noting that by October 1922, the war had been over for nearly four years. However, it is clear from this thematic overlap in the rest of the magazines’ content that Eliot was not the only one still interested in the war’s aftermath and long-term effects on society.

In The Dial, there is an installment of the novel Doctor Graesler by Arthur Schnitzler, in which much of the conflict is driven by sexual jealousy and the fear of adultery. Likewise, in The Criterion, part of May Sinclair’s The Victim is included. In this story, which is set during the war, the master of the main character persuades his lover to leave him, and because of this he is driven to murder his master. The men in these stories are left alone by women, or in other words, they are left sterile, because they no longer have a partner to allow for the manifestation of their potential fertility, and they act out on this feeing of abandoment. This resonates with the pub scene of “The Waste Land” (lines 140-172) when the speaker indicates that she took the pleasure of Lil’s husband’s sexuality since Lil had rejected her own fertility with an attempted abortion of his child. “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” must have been on the minds of many who felt the loss of a considerable portion of men at the reproductive stage of life from their society. Still, it is interesting that Schnitzler and Sinclair present men rahter than women as their forcedly sterile characters.

T. Sturge Moore, who wrote an essay about “The Story of Tristram and Isolt in Modern Poetry” for the same edition of The Criterion, brings some middle ground to this question. He acknowledges that Tristram’s and Isolt’s situation “forced illegal passion on” both of them. That is to say, both sexes suffer when they are deprived of an outlet for their passions. Still he asks, “Is adultery ever to be condoned?” The tension Moore recognizes between people’s need to be fertile and the question of its inherent “rightness” is relevant to what Eliot is exploring in “The Waste Land.” Humanity’s distrust in or even “divorce” from nature and natural law that Eliot depicts as a result of the war must include a questioning of what the previously accepted paradigm of right and wrong. One image from “The Waste Land”—“a heap of broken images” (line 22)—can be applied as a description to what the poem itself is, what society looks like after the war, and what people’s current perception of the former order is.

Furthermore, Hermann Hesse eloquently sums up the reason these three themes tend to be so connected in the post-war environment. In his essay “Recent German Poetry” from The Criterion, he explains that the experience of the Great War entailed “the collapse of all the old forms and the breakdown of moral codes and cultures hitherto valid.” Because of this, obviously the new generation must create its own “codes” that are going to work in a different way now that something as awful as a world war is a conceivable reality. He goes on to enumerate “the two central interests of youth”: “rebellion against authority and against the culture of that authority in process of downfall; and eroticism.” Hesse, too, sees a relationship between fertility issues, distrust in society/authority, and the War. From all the thematic overlap in these two magazines with the content of “The Waste Land,” it only makes sense to admit that Eliot’s poem is not a thing to be read in isolation from its context. Since the other literary pieces treat some of the same subjects, it is fair to assume that those subjects were primary concerns of the scholarly class in both the America and Europe. Familiarizing oneself with these contextual similarities allows a reader of “The Waste Land” to focus in on what would have been most important to Eliot’s contemporary audience, and perhaps to understand more successfully what meaning Eliot wants to transmit through the poem.