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Introduction
Eliot's visionary poem, The Waste Land, gnaws at the bones of twentieth-century Anglo-American society to reveal the alienation of the modern west from the non-human world, alongside a desperate but convoluted longing to re-commune with organic elements and forces. The poem's arid world of shattered and scattered images conveys the fragmented state of the urbanized soul as well as its desacralized environment. A reflection upon metropolitan life across the ages, from Jerusalem, Athens and Alexandria, to London and Vienna (l. 375-6), the narrative voice ponders the way pedestrians in the "Unreal City" (60 and 377) seem to exist in a lifeless state: "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/I had not thought death had undone so many" (62-3). The quintessential modern environment is experienced, by Eliot's first-person narrator, as a series of "fragments I have shored against my ruins" (431). London Bridge is "falling down" (427), as are the towers of cities around the world, with traditional forces of fertility struggling for recognition among the devastating consequences of technological society. Urbanization so often works to alienate its populace from the non-human world, while the individual is imagined by Eliot to be locked inside the body as if this were a form of punishment. When Eliot writes that "We think of the key, each in his [sic] prison" (414), his harrowing appraisal touches such a deep nerve not only because it identifies the personal mind or body as a form of incarceration but because it indicates the way that the modern psyche in general senses its alienation from the rest of nature. Eliot's wasteland succeeds in displaying modernity's failure, existing both within the psyche and without it, in the world, illuminating the existential dilemma of twentieth-century life as well as anticipating the ecological crisis looming from within the shadows of the very project of urban civilization itself.
Sacrificial Kings, Sacred Marriage and Failed Regeneration Rites
The Waste Land stands as a paradigmatic example of high modernity operating in its nostalgic mode.1 Eliot's own "Notes" to the poem make clear the centrality of western mythic history and its dispersed traditions of regeneration rituals. For instance, Eliot suggests with his first note that Jessie Weston's 1920 anthropological study, From Ritual to Romance, suggested "a good deal...