Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put it, “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). To compare Eliot’s comments on the poem with the way it was received illustrates strikingly the fact that, as William K. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” Nonetheless, it was as a representative of a postwar generation that Eliot became famous. Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed.” Eliot later complained that “approving critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. The Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist poetics, both for its broad symbolic significance and for Eliot’s masterful use of formal techniques that earlier modernists had only begun to attempt. In 1922, however, his anxieties about the modern world were still overwhelming. Eliot went on to convert to a High Church form of Anglicanism, become a naturalized British subject, and turn to conservative politics. One of its major themes is the barrenness of a post-war world in which human sexuality has been perverted from its normal course and the natural world too has become infertile. Eliot later described the poem as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life…just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” Yet the poem seemed to his contemporaries to transcend Eliot’s personal situation and represent a general crisis in western culture.
Unhappily married, he suffered writer’s block and then a breakdown soon after the war and wrote most of The Waste Land while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age of 33.
He taught grammar school briefly and then took a job at Lloyds Bank, where he worked for eight years. Because of the war, he was unable to return to the United States to receive his degree. Louis, Eliot had studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before moving to London, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on the philosopher F. Eliot’s poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the first world war and from Eliot’s personal travails. “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” wrote Ezra Pound shortly after the poem was published in 1922.
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