In a 1923 edition of the American literary magazine The Dial, T.S. Eliot penned this intriguing thought: “All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.”
Quite what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote these words will present an enigma to those who try and decipher them. Such artful opacity is the case with so much of his work. And yet, there is the appealing possibility that this slippery piece of criticism subtlety refers to Eliot’s own epoch-defining masterpiece The Waste Land.
If analysed closely, the poem – published in 1922 as one of the pinnacles of the modernist movement – is found to be replete with references to the enactment of ancient rite and ceremony. Within its five sections we are afforded glimpses of the primeval activities of fertility cults; we hear liturgical lines from the Book of Common Prayer; echoes of a Sanskrit mantra recited by Brahmin priests in Hindu invocations; the ritualistic exhortations of a Buddhist scripture; and even the cyclical rites of the natural world. These threads of ritual are seamlessly braided into The Waste Land’s fabric. They allow Eliot, ever the consummate craftsman, to create a poetry that is driven by humanity’s primordial impulses –bewildering to the reader as they are bewitching.
