Myth and Violence in The Waste Land

As evidenced by his writings, T.S. Eliot has a profound appreciation for the use of myth as a point of departure for maintaining a cultural or historical perspective. In "The Waste Land," his employment of myth is not simply an allusive and metaphorical tactic, but rather an attempt at relating his own ideas and tropes to universals in order to establish some external order for the chaos he is presenting: "The element of myth in his art is not so much a creative method, a resumption of the role of mythic poet, as it is an intellectual strategy, a device for gaining perspective on himself and on his myth-forsaken time" (Ellmann, 621). He draws from the ideas existing in the collective unconsciousness (which compose myth) and the differences in his representations present his own ideas about the human condition.

The fact that mythic structures are repeated cross-culturally evidences them as the outcome of primitive, common thought. These structures include concepts of life and death cycles; degeneration, death, and decay; purgation, purification, and rebirth; and creation and destruction. A common thread throughout the various mythic structures is that of violence. Violence is necessary for the completion of mythic processes. A simple example of this idea is the axiom that destruction (an intrinsically violent act) is a pre-requisite for creation. Furthermore, myth entails specific, violent acts against the human form as means for purgation and purification.

On another level, creation is a violent exploit not only through its relationship to destruction, but also through its relationship to sexuality. The sex act, the animal process of creation, is an act of violence against the female for...

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...t regenerate, and his very use of structured myth conveys through contrast Eliot's concern with the utter chaos of modern life.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Harcourt Brace & Company: New York, 1958.

Ellmann, Richard "The First Waste Land." In Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land." Princeton, Princeton UP, 1973.

Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough. Princeton University Press, 1973.

Works Consulted

Eliot, T. S. "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," from Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Frank Kermode, ed. London : Faber and Faber, 1975. 177.

Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr., ed. The Modern Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.