Eliot and his contemporaries challenged the meaning of everything and began to express their disenchanted world view, through new explorations of style and form. Stevenson states that although the effects of modernisation were evident, it was the great war that “made the destructive aspects of modernity inescapable and the need for new artistic forms unavoidable” (Stevenson). Modernist artists, writers, and poets sought to discover a new means to express this fragmentation and destruction. The world they had previously inhabited soon became deeply fragmented. Many influential modernists like Eliot were questioning the older and more established ideals of the pre-war era, that were often seen as some of the primary causes of the war and the widespread suffering that it caused.
Poets like Pond and Eliot, who were rebelling against the established literary norm, experimented with form, style, language, and subject. He was well-connected with the modernist sphere, famous American poet, Ezra Pound mentered him. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888- 1965), was already an influential poetic voice within the modernist movement when he arrived in England, three months before the outbreak of war (Lynch). During the course of this essay, I will firstly discuss the importance of Eliot within the modernist sphere then I will explain how the phrase from The Wasteland, “The fragments I have shored against my ruins…” is an adequate summary for Eliot’s complicated poem. The Waste Land is a deeply complex and riveting poem, with various cultural and literary references and ground-breaking structure and subject. Writers and poets therefore, had to create new ways of exploring this new and drastically changed world, creating controversial literary work, breaking away from the normative, traditional standard.
Modernists, such as Eliot, were rebelling against the traditional status quo and were struggling to find new ways of “expressing an experience that shattered a continent” (Lynch). However, it was the horror and shock of the first world war that really transformed the movement. Modernism, a cultural and literary movement, swept Western Europe in the early twentieth century. T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), is considered one of the most influential poems of the modernist movement, even maintaining its influence after the second world war and during the subsequent growth of post-modernism.
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