One Hundred Years in the Unreal City
Christian Prophecy in The Waste Land
“We dwell in the Unreal City,” writes Anthony Esolen. “We all dwell there. We have all been dulled and deadened by the unreal. But if God is real, then to turn away from God is to leap into unreality, and that is pretty much the definition of evil” (Sex and the Unreal City, 2020, 8). The phrase “unreal city” is not Professor Esolen’s coinage. It originates in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, first published a century ago, in October 1922. It immediately became a literary sensation because of its arrestingly innovative techniques and its grimly ironic vision of the modern world, and it remains the most famous and influential poem of the twentieth century. It is notoriously difficult to understand, and for many readers, since its initial publication down to our own time, its elusive discourse and apparently incoherent structure are simply an expression of disillusionment and disgust in the face of a sterile, meaningless world.
When a Christian reads Eliot’s landmark poem today, however, he is likely to marvel at how prescient the poet was in describing the decadence of Western society as it has degenerated in the course of the following century. Few readers saw this, however, until, six years after the publication of The Waste Land, Eliot announced that he was “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Not until then did critics begin to suspect—some with dismay—that the scriptural allusions and other Christian references in the poem might be something more than random fragments shorn of context and Christian meaning.
A consideration of the relationship between Eliot’s poem and orthodox, historical Christianity is, then, not only a compelling topic in its own right; it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the place of poetry in the spiritual and intellectual life of the Christian faithful; for the role of The Waste Land in Western culture suggests how a poem, even a poem by a man who is not yet committed to the Christian faith, can have an effect analogous to scriptural prophecy.
The Artist’s Self-Sacrifice
Sensible critics and poets will not, of course, regard poetry as “prophetic” in the scriptural sense of emerging from direct divine revelation, as did such Romantics as Blake and Shelley. Poetry is not a substitute for the Bible, for the actual Word of God. It can, nonetheless, be a means of seeing the world more clearly and recognizing the creation as a reality independent of our assumptions and desires. Imaginative literature demands that we step outside the enclosed circle of our self-absorption and regard the human experience from a different perspective. In the case of a genuine literary artist, this alternative is not merely the view of another individual, expressing his own self-interested viewpoint. What defines literary excellence is precisely the talent to represent general human experience rather than the idiosyncratic preoccupations of the author.
“Talents,” as we know from the New Testament parable, are God-given. And in this respect, literature can be analogous to prophecy, which, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out, is not a “habit”; that is, an acquired faculty or skill that can be deployed at will: “Someone cannot make use of prophecy when he wishes” (Summa Theologia II-II.171). In parallel fashion, although a man must use the skill, knowledge, and wisdom at his disposal when he sets out to produce a poem, a play, or a novel, he cannot be sure in advance where his literary efforts will lead—not, that is, if he is true to the vision of human experience with which the work begins.
Eliot himself lays out the basis for this view of literary creation in an essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In the composition of a work of literature, Eliot suggests, the role of the writer is not to project his opinions or his personality. “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (The Sacred Wood 1920, 52–53). “The more perfect the artist,” he adds, “the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (54); and, most crucial, “the difference between art and the event is always absolute” (56). Although Othello is a profound and edifying tragedy, we should not care to be present for the actual events the drama depicts. Similarly, the Iliad and the Odyssey are compelling works that capture the attention of a vast array of readers more than two and a half millennia after their composition, but we know nothing about Homer’s political opinions.
To be sure, we know a good deal more about T. S. Eliot, and much has been written, often disapprovingly, about his opinions—political, religious, and literary. Nevertheless, it would be folly to assume that The Waste Land is a compendium of the poet’s opinions, much less the mere “personal grouse” that he called it years later, when he was weary of being identified as the spokesman for the disillusionment of the “lost generation.” His willing submission of successive manuscripts to the often severe, howbeit astute, editing of Ezra Pound confirms that he regarded his work as something more than self-expression. It is because Eliot was willing to sacrifice his personality—the demands of his ego—to the integrity of the poem as a work of art that The Waste Land provides a representation of reality transcending the conscious individual intentions of the poet who wrote it.
Overview of the Poem
The title of the poem derives from Eliot’s reading of Sir James G. Fraser’s The Golden Bough (1911–1915) and, especially, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920). These two works of early anthropology deal, respectively, with pagan notions of the dying and rising god and the sacrifice necessary to assure the fertility of the land, and with the Christian legend of the quest for the Holy Grail, which Weston associates with a wounded king, who must be healed for fertility to be restored to his land. The Grail is, of course, the Chalice used at the Last Supper and subsequently by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood flowing from the wound in our Lord’s side as he hung upon the Cross.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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