Multiple Voices of The Waste Land Rebecca Howden

Aesthetically merging erudition and emotion through a cacophony of diverse and often dissonant voices, The Waste Land serves as a microcosm of the modern state of mind and the state of the world itself. The personality and experiences of individuals are fused together, obscuring boundaries to form a richly layered paradigm of the universal psyche that emulates the reason of an insane mind.

Friends of T S Eliot have frequently interpreted The Waste Land as “Tom’s autobiography,” and yet the poet has famously insisted that his writing is in fact not an expression of personality, but on the contrary an escape from it. The perplexing question of identity and voice, therefore, is a preoccupation that anchors many explorations of the poem, mystifying readers as they wade through an inconsistent parade of personalities, never sure exactly who is speaking at any time and which, if any, is the voice of Eliot himself. Of course, no piece of art can be entirely impersonal, and even a shallow observation of Eliot’s life proves that his experiences and personality are not wholly divorced from the voices of the poem, yet through the profusion of connected and conflicting characters intensely personal material takes on universal resonances,...