T.S. Eliot’s Salvation Thought And Its Performance In The Waste Land

In the 20th century, especially after 1950s, the western world has witness the decline of civilization featuring the poverty of spirit and lack of religious beliefs, as well as the pursuit of new rationality and new road of salvation. This pursuit is the return of humanism in a higher sense. It is under this social background that T.S. Eliot, the father of modern western poetry, writes a series of poems to express his concern about the poverty of the spirit, the chaos and the dark situation of modern society, and to show his reflection on the historical process of modernisation.It is worth noticing that a religious salvation mode, the mode of “ betrayal,destruction and salvation”, can be found in the Christian classics Bible. T.S. Eliot’s religious conversion at midlife and his belief in Anglo-Catholicism, to some extent,have an impact on the consciousness of salvation and salvation mode in his poetry writing. The thesis, from the perspective of the Christian salvation mode of Bible,analyses the salvation thought and salvation mode hidden in Eliot’s poetry, which hopefully will provide a novel approach to understand the salvation thought of Eliot’s poetry.