How are issues of faith or belief represented in T.S.Eliots The Waste Land?
Faith and belief, or the lack of it, has always played a major part in T.S. Eliot’s canon; perhaps more than any other Modernist writer, Eliot reflects the zeitgeist that was described by Spears Brooker (1994) as “characterized by a collapse of faith in human innate goodness and in the inevitability of progress.” (Brooker Spears, 1994, p.61) To this end, this paper looks at how such issues are represented in Eliot’s early work The Waste Land (1989) that, as we shall see, can be thought of as paradigmatic of both Modernist notions of the role of faith in society and Eliot’s own relationship to an increasingly orthodox spirituality. As Hugh Kenner (1965) details, issues of faith and belief, in The Waste Land, are inextricably linked with that other depiction of European decay Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1994): “It had for an epitaph a phrase from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (“The horror! The horror!”); embedded in the text were a glimpse, borrowed from Conrad’s opening page, of the
