We may then apply such a temporal relativism to “The Waste Land” itself, saying that in our perception of Eliot’s poem, we have a temporal advantage over the poet, as his time is historical to us today. He was 34, and though Eliot’s personal life is not necessarily the primary source of energy for his creative works, such a supplementary, personalized energy, on top of a cultural one, may explain the potency of his seemingly disparate imagism, juxtapositions and psychologically turbulent atmosphere.Īccording to Eliot, rather than losing an authentic interpretation, we actually gain it through distance. It was during this traumatic time that Eliot produced the fragmented and disturbing work known as “The Waste Land” (1921-22).
Along with this, his life during the early 1920s was under personal strain due to marriage difficulties with his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and Eliot, now near nervous-breakdown, spent two months in a Swiss Sanitorium. Eliot was born in 1888 and by the age of 29 he had published his first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) amidst the seemingly unending carnage of western civilization’s First World War (1914-1918).
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