T.S Eliot and Writing As Empathy

“April is the cruelest month,” once wrote the 20th century poet T.S Eliot in what would become one of his most acclaimed works, the sprawling anthology called The Waste Land, “breeding/lilacs out of the dead land/mixing memory and desire.” Eliot referred to the advent of spring post-First World War, a time of negotiated peace nonetheless made tragic by the shadow of past violence, during which in the poem, Eliot conducts a vividly melancholy search for meaning. Although the April of this year doesn’t quite share the same broader postwar context as the month that shaped Eliot’s magnum opus, there’s still much to be learned from the Waste Land about the role of creative work in times of strife. 

The Great War, as it was known at the time, was not just a period of immense devastation but an upheaval into total uncertainty. Total war, effectively turning entire national populations into components of the machinery of conflict, caused absolute collapse for all normalized aspects of civilian life. Eliot described the post-war landscape as a “heap of broken images,” where urban life had fallen into a nihilistic space of disarray. Ghosts haunted such stretches of time both historically and narratively - Eliot has a morbid conversation with a dead war-taken comrade, about a corpse found casually buried in the yard that he suspects will soon blossom - commentary on the contradictions between rebirth and stagnation from violence. 

Between it all Eliot’s desert served as a reflection on the role of creative minds in the wake of immense cruelty. Eliot is somewhat of a passive observer, who transforms his voice into that of the collective experience the world is going through, and bears fragments of others’ sorrows and faint hopes and nostalgic regrets. Eliot’s usage of collective voice is critically significant to writing about the wake of tragedy, and can be seen in many other narratives regarding war and brutality. Post-World War 2, writers became increasingly concerned about representing civilian populations in relation to the transformed world around them - the Beat Generation of authors like Allen Ginsberg particularly, whose repetition of “millions”  in his poem September on Jessore Road literally portrays a population’s struggles reflecting on the immense tragedy of the 1971 Bangladeshi refugee crisis. Existential themes were prominent - as a means of writers attempting to comprehend the world and process direction through writing about collective grief. 

The value of such writing was more than just that of social critique or historical narrative, but a means of processing grief beyond an individual level. By blending the lines between single perspectives and universalizing ones, writers became vessels for whole communities to engage in productive reflection. In the Waste Land, Eliot’s search for meaning is less of a single individual’s existentialist findings after wartime but that of an entire population trying to make sense of the world, and in its disjunctioned form an appeal to all.