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Michael Elliott
Thomas Hodd Ph.D.
Foundations of Literature II
14 April 2015
A00167398

Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print licks
words into position in this space. Control of position is everything in print.
- Walter J. Ong

A Literary Wasteland: The Examination of the Tensions of Orality and Literacy is

Eliots The Waste Land

T.S. Eliots The Waste Land is often considered to be the most influential poem of
the 20th century. With its extensive use of outside sources linking to create a scattered
plotline, Eliot crafted a piece that would stump readers and scholars alike for
centuries. In the poem, the reader is forced to wrestle with the oral tradition of having
context from other texts, but to also have it be presented in a form of concrete,
physical poetry. This becomes problematic when trying to examine the poem, as
instead of reading The Waste Land as a whole, it must first be read, or rather
spoken, one line at a time.
To begin, the literary form of poetry, or rather verse, was created in a fashion
for it to be read aloud. In prose, sentences form structure and flow in order to create a

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well-detailed line of plot points and an overall story, while verse on the other hand
was created simply to best mimic oral styles of communication. When one is
speaking, rarely is there ever a use of filler words to ensure that the sentence holds up
grammatically. Instead, there is meter and stressed syllables to communicate the
importance of certain words or statements. This method was adopted into verse as
early as the middle ages, and continues still to be relevant in modern day literature.
With that being said, it is argued that poetry at its truest form is supposed to be read
aloud and any other method of doing so is unjust to the artform. Jorge Luis Borges
says,

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be
read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem:
a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral
art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song. (Seven
Nights, p.7)

Upon initial reading, The Waste Land appears to simply be a mess of words
jumbled together. Jumping from different perspectives, even different languages at
some points, there seems to be no continuity in the hidden plot. Although the reader
may not fully understand what is being said in Eliots verses, it does for one reason or
another offer a sense of achievement after a reading. This comes from Eliots idea to
include allusions and quotes from other famous works in order to advance his
message. Blending these allusions from written works into his poem, Eliot created

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lines that are familiar to some readers, but remained foreign to others. Walter Ong
speaks of this in his book Orality and Literacy when he explains some methods that
would have had to be used by oral storytellers in order to keep the craft alive. Ong
says that,

In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to

structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must
conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close
reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the
more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings. (Orality and Literacy,
42)

With that being said, the inclusion of quotations and allusions from other popular
works such as Shakespeare, songs and biblical references not only allowed those who
were familiar with the works to have a sense of pride when reading the poem, but on
the other hand, created a mass confusion for those who were unaware that any of the
lines came from other sources. For those whom had prior knowledge of the quotations
found in The Waste Land, it created a circle of savvy readers, able to help each
other understand the hidden agenda found in the poem. This created a new sense of
exclusivity to poetry and literature, and encouraged others to read and discuss such
works in groups.
Furthermore, Eliot stated in the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent
that for one to understand and write poetry, they must first enter into a dialogue and

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be familiar with tradition. He also states that doing this will make all other poetry
familiar, and will allow the reader to understand it in a new light. In saying this, it
makes sense why Eliot decided to include so many different poets and authors in his
poem, simply because he was attempting to fully understand his craft. Pericles Lewis
says that Eliots technique of allusion serves various functions: to give symbolic
weight to the poems contemporary material, to encourage a sort of free association in
the mind of the reader, and to establish a tone of pastiche, seeming to collect all the
bric-a-brac of an exhausted civilization into one giant, foul rag and bone shop.
(Lewis, 2007) The use of so many fragmented, jumpy quotations was to duplicate the
effect of a divided world that was fragmented from war and exhaustion. Lewis goes
on to say that,

The poet lives in a modern waste land, in the aftermath of a great war, in an
industrialized society that lacks traditional structures of authority and belief, in
soil that may not be conducive to new growth. Even if he could become
inspired, however, the poet would have no original materials to work with. His
imagination consists only of a heap of broken images,

Continuing the oral tradition, Eliot makes several more allusions in the following 434
lines of verse. In the first 76 lines alone, there are allusions found from: Geoffrey
Chaucer, Rupert Brooke, Walt Whitman, Thophile Gautier, Charles-Louis Philippe,
James Thomson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Countess Marie Larisch, Wyndham Lewis,
nine books of the Bible, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Wagner,

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Sappho, Catullus, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, J. G. Frazer, Jessie
L. Weston, W. B. Yeats, Shakespeare, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelaire, Dante, Ezra
Pound, James Joyce, and John Webster evening out to about one allusion per every
two lines.
Looking further into Ongs ideas in Orality and Literacy, Ong states that many
oral traditionalists chose the additive rather than the subordinative. This can be
found in many instances in Eliots poem, further linking it to oral tradition. In The
Burial of the Dead, Eliot writes:

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. (Eliot, 1922)

Having three lines that begin with and speaks closely to Ongs statement, also
having many uses of the word beginning many of the sentences. This used to help
improve the memory of the reciter as it made the story much chunkier and able to be

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memorized in blocks as though it were a list of events rather than a story in whole. In
saying this, The Waste Land can be read as just that, a list of events or dialogues
from different perspectives. The multiple uses of the and could also be to give the
reader a slight familiarity factor, as it closely mimics the Bibles use of and found
most notably in Genesis.
Looking further into the poem, Eliot uses other methods of orality by
including many passages written in other languages, or by providing the reader with
dialogue from different perspectives. For example, remaining in the first part of the
poem, Eliot writes:

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du? (Eliot, 1922)

Switching languages like this not only offers the reader a sense of shift, but it also
offers the illusion of orality, as if this part is meant to be spoken. These lines are taken
directly from a German opera called Tristan und Isolde, written in 1865 by Richard
Wagner. Interestingly enough, as if calling back to Wagners work wasnt traditional

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enough, even the story of the opera is based on a medieval romance that falls under
Arthurian tradition.
Having this poem surface the same year as James Joyces modernist gem,
Ulysses, also played a major role in the creation and orality of this poem.

Eliot read the early episodes of Ulysses that appeared in the Little Review; as
assistant editor at The Egoist, he read the original drafts of five episodes that
were published there in 1919. He also read other parts of the novel in
manuscript and corresponded with Joyce about it. He later confessed to having
felt that Joyces Ulysses did superbly what Eliot himself was tentatively
attempting to do, with the usual false starts and despairs. (Lewis, 2007)

No doubt, consulting Joyce about his work on his own modernist piece would have
played a major role in the production of The Waste Land, and this would bring the
oral tradition to its final halt, as not only did Eliot confirm a sort of collaboration and
inspiration drawn from Joyce, but also was very open about the work that his editor,
Ezra Pound brought to the table. Having this sense of openness with his
collaborations show that the trade of being an author or a poet is no longer that of
mystery, but now a certified career, as they are now able to make reference to a
literary past and history, and also to their fellow authors and poets.
In all, what can be said about The Waste Land is that it is a loaded poem.
Not only does it contain allusions from arguably some of the most important works in
literary history, but also it does so in a fashion that helped create a whole new period

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in literature known as modernism. Although it would be a few years before Eliot

would release his textual notes to follow up the poem and to help explain all of the
meanings and allusions behind his work, The Waste Land would still remain one of
the most ambiguous and important pieces of literature in the world. Blending oral and
literary traditions, this work perfectly describes not only the world and period in
which it was written, fragmented and destroyed, but also shows the evolution of
literary tradition through orality and written works, helping hold its importance for
years to come.

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Works Cited

Borge, Jorge Luis. Seven Nights. New Directions , 1977.

Elliot, T. S. "The Waste Land." Bartleby.com. Bartleby, n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2015.
Lewis, Pericles. "The Waste Land." The Modernist Lab. Cambridge: The Modernist Lab,
2007. Web. 4 Apr. 2015.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen,
1982. Print.