As I have mentioned in class before, I enjoy studying epic poetry and have written papers in several classes on the subject.  At Pittsburg State (where I got my B.A. and M.A.), I took a class on the British Epic, and in the course, we read and discussed Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Modernist epic.  I realize that rehashing all that I learned in another class wouldn’t necessarily do much good (and would take up a lot of space), so instead, I thought I would do a more specific “epic” reading of the text.  First, it is important to mention why one could argue that the poem is an epic one at all. 

An epic poem comes in two forms: the folk (or primary) epic and the literary (or secondary) epic.  The literary epic (for instance, Milton’s Paradise Lost) uses the conventions of a folk epic (like Homer’s The Odyssey).  Some of these epic conventions are: major digressions from the story; grandiose language; the display of the poet’s almost-encyclopedic knowledge of history, art, and mythology; the fate of nations being at stake; and the hero’s trip to the Underworld.  I feel that Eliot, at various points within the poem, fulfills these conventions.  His small vignettes create a fragmented narrative that seemingly digresses from the discussion of the Unreal City of London.  He uses both high and low language, but I definitely feel like his quotations create a very grandiose feel.  He definitely shows off his knowledge of literature and mythology, as we are constantly getting references to other literary works, ideas, mythological figures, etc.  As far as the fate of a nation being at stake, culture itself is fragmented and broken.  Maybe Western society’s literal fate may be safe, but its metaphoric fate is almost (if not completely) doomed.  Obviously, the fact that World War I caused all of this fragmentation makes the epic element even more appropriate.  Finally, as I argued in a previous paper, I believe that London itself constitutes a figurative “Underworld” in The Waste Land.  For instance, we get connections of the “Unreal City” to Dante’s Inferno, as well as images of “brown fog” and the “dead” people on London Bridge.  Also, the use of Tiresias in “The Fire Sermon” definitely fits with the Underworld aspect, as Tiresias is the blind soothsayer who speaks with Odysseus in the Underworld.  

However, when reading The Waste Land as the modern form of an epic poem, we are immediately met with a problem: where is the epic hero of the story?  Notice that Tiresias, instead of having a hero come ask for his prophetic advice (as in The Odyssey), is left to watch the young man carbuncular have sex with the unsatisfied typist.  As the structure of the poem is fragmented and we get a multitude of voices from around the city, I would argue that Eliot and his speaker function as the hero—if, indeed, we can say there is one at all.  If the speakers are the hero of the epic, they are definitely not the powerful, dynamic type of figures we see in Odysseus or in Satan from Paradise Lost.  They are intentionally weak and almost powerless to affect their world.  However, the speaker of the poem does exhibit some power in that it is showing us all of these different parts and levels of modern society.

Another possibility would be that the reader is the figurative hero of the Underworld.  The speaker—much like Sybil in The Aeneid or Virgil in Dante’s Inferno—is leading us through the hellish Unreal City of London, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna.  In this case, each little fragment of the poem functions much the same as one of the many circles of hell or glimpses of Dis that we see in these earlier epic poems.  If this is the case, Eliot is emphasizing something even more disturbing: there is nothing we can really do to redeem the “Waste Land” that is civilization after the Great War.