A Study On The Multiplex Voices In The Waste Land

Probably no one has had more influence over the ways in which we have been trained to think about literature than Eliot. As a Nobel Prize laureate and certainly one of the banner-bearers of Modernism, T.S. Eliot was influential in many fields, for instance, poetry, drama, literary criticism, etc. Since he published his first volume of poems in 1917, T.S. Eliot had gradually overcome the incomprehension or dislike of critics bound by nineteenth-century literary conventions and won an authority as a poet seconded by his prestige as a critic, publicist, and playwright. The Waste Land, one of his most important single poems, has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th century modern English poetry. With bold technical innovations in versification and style, the poem not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern western world but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation. For its collage style The Waste Land becomes a battleground of multiplex voices and philosophical meditation.The idea of this thesis, a humble inch forward in criticism of Eliot's poetry, comes slowly through perusal of materials available to me either in English or in Chinese. After making a review of the criticism of T.S. Eliot and his poetry both in China and western countries, the thesis tries to analyze The Waste Land from a different perspective, which is to interpret the poem by analyzing the multiplex voices in it. The term voice in criticism points to the fact that in a work, there are the fictitious voices spoken by the dramatic personae, the voice of the narrator (the speaker in a poem) and the voice which implies a pervasive authorial presence. Although the sense of a distinctive authorial presence is not so evident in the work of most Modernist writers, there exists an implied author who has invented, ordered, and rendered all the literary characters and materials in his own way. The Waste Land is such a work constituted by multiplex voices. Therefore, The Waste Land is no more a monologic poem but a dialogic interaction of multiplex voices, in which the speakers of different occupations, social strata, even in different space and time are liberated to speak a...