Meaning in a Handful of Dust

Abstract

With his famed poem The Waste Land, Thomas Stears Eliot wrote an example of a new method of creating art, as he observed the novel to be an outdated form of description which no longer did justice to society. The plethora of researchers the poem has inspired seem to agree on the plotless form of the text. By examining the method employed in combination with Eliot’s opinions regarding literary criticism and modern writing it is argued that there is a form of narrative at work in The Waste Land, which might have been overlooked because of a focus on plot in most critics. The interpretative basis of the poem and the use of an objective correlative by the author will be explained in order to allow for a wider scope of the meaning of narrative which Eliot argued for, creating a platform for sensation instead of moral message to come from a text interwoven with mythology. The unchronological result for which T. S. Eliot argues is then tested in a text created for the purpose of examining the strategy distilled from The Waste Land. All prerogatives regarding this creation are observed, leaving the interpretation to the reader, as is integral to a poem created by use of the mythical method.