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In the first chapter of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), Anthony Blanche-aesthete, epicure, and homosexual dandy-stands on the balcony of Sebastian Flyte's rooms in Christ Church College reading The Waste Land (1922) through a megaphone to passing students. At the time the action of Waugh's novel begins, the early 1920s, T.S. Eliot's poem was already a succes de scandale, and Blanche's affected, stammering recitation was calculated to elicit much the same response as a heavy metal band in the clubhouse of a gated retirement community. The few lines of the poem that appear in the novel are there to mark Blanche as a student of extraordinarily avant-garde knowledge and precociously decadent taste. For upon its first appearance, The Waste Land struck most readers as a defiant, outre assault by a modish cynic on all the decencies of English literature and society.
Evelyn Waugh, of course, knew better: one of his first novels after his conversion to Catholicism, A Handful of Dust (1934), takes its title and its epigraph from The Waste Land, which is evoked to add gravity and insight to Waugh's macabre satire. What Waugh perceived was that Eliot was more conservative-more deeply committed to the religious and cultural values of the Western world-than many of his most severe critics. Although the poem seemed to be an attack upon respectable Christian society, it was in reality a lament, and a cry of alarm, over the deliquescence of the civilization of the West: falling into a comfortable materialism, devoid of all authentic Christianity, and with only a sterile respectability left behind. When The Waste Land was first published, Eliot's own conversion was still several years in the future, and the poem does not assume an explicitly Christian perspective. Despite its "modernist" techniques, however, the poem implies a prophetic denunciation of the secularism, rationalism, and materialism characteristic of the modern era. The Waste Land is thus the most notable instance of radically innovative, "modernist" art in the service of tradition.
It is the flexibility and ambivalence of poetic style that allow an innovative technique to serve a traditional vision. While the surface texture of The Waste Land suggests irony and disillusionment, its underlying structure is mythic; that is, it organizes experience in terms of grand, epic...