Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land

Abstract

In terms of literary history, Eliot’s development from his arrival in England in 1914 to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922 can be read as a triumphant passage: from isolated foreigner in an atmosphere of extreme patriotism to the most prominent writer in London; from poetry disordered by emotional excess to that which articulated and modernised Western culture since Homer. Throughout this period, however, Eliot’s personal life lurched from one crisis to another, culminating in a nervous breakdown. Substituting literary history with the clinical terms of Ferenczi, one could go as far as to posit correspondences between the stages of Eliot’s development and those of a dissociated personality:

The content of the split-off ego is always as follows: natural development and spontaneity, protest against violence and injustice, contemptuous, perhaps sarcastic and ironic obedience displayed in the face of domination, but inward knowledge that the violence has in fact achieved nothing … Contentment with oneself for this accomplishment, a feeling of being bigger and cleverer than the brutal force; suddenly insight into the greater coherence of world order, the treatment of brute force as a kind of mental disorder.¹

Eliot experienced a deluded sense of spontaneity in his brief courtship then marriage to Vivienne in 1915; he oscillated between protest and obedience to the conditions forced upon him by war, as expressed in the satirical but technically disciplined quatrain poems from 1917. The final stage of self-contentment and sense of insight into the brutal conditions of Europe at war was manifested in his critical writing from 1919 onwards and the completed version of The Waste Land.