Early Twentieth-Century Literature – Modernist Literature in Particular – Is Never More of Its Time Than When Aspiring to Appear Timeless, or at Least to Evoke Ideas of Timelessness. Discuss with Reference to Your Chosen Texts.

The Waste Land asserts its authority as a twentieth century literary monument by way of its acute analysis into a generation and its drearily banal social activity. An incredulous authority haunts the reader throughout the poem, who witnesses the demise of modernity being played out by an array of contemporary situations; marriage, friendship, a drink in a bar; all customary aspects of modern Western civilisation. An instance of this occurs in “III. The Fire Sermon”, as lust’s unforgiving nonchalance overrides an oppressively demeaning subjection of sexual intercourse between a man and woman, ‘Bestows one final patronising kiss, and gropes his way finding the stairs unlit...’   A casual fling of debauchery, something to kill time, without even a slightly insinuating streak of intimacy. The ending of this line requires little assumption but paints a very real image of the naked, used woman resting upon the bed, indifferent to what has happened.
Eliot draws comparisons to modern femininity in this context with the mythical Sibyl of Cumae, as Vickery probes its relevance, ‘Eliot also creates a link between Cumae and London, past and present [...] Each in her own way is confronted by an endless vista of misery, despair and boredom. Each is a mute prophetess dramatizing the doom of a single aspect of the social order, a doom that is not physical death and dissolution but unending life and degradation.’   The Sibyl’s doleful demeanour witnessed in the poem is reactive to its inability to die, the physical barbarity of this mythic legend is painful enough but, as Gish illuminates, ‘life is a horror because it can never regain meaning.’   This harks to the opening passage in the poem and breeds light upon it ambiguities and its relevance to modernity; April as the cruellest month ushers an assertion that contemporary society is existing within a perpetual month of April, a seasonal period that is ‘hung between the two poles of birth and death’ . The time when middle... [continues]

Read full essay