Myth and Violence in The Waste Land Essay -- T.S. Eliot Waste Land Ess

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 mythical poet, as it is an intellectual strategy, a device for gaining perspective on himself and on his myth-forsaken beat (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 recurrent cross-culturally evidences them as the outcome of primitive, common thought. These structures include concepts of life and dea th cycles degeneration, death, and decay purgation, purification, and rebirth and creation and destruction. A common thread by dint ofout 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 tempestuous 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 blood 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... ...t regenerate, and his very use of structured myth conveys through contrast Eliots 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 La nd. 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 new-fangled Tradition. New York Oxford University Press, 1965. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.