"Heaps of Broken Images: T.S. Eliot and His Post-War Scenarios"

In a letter to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley, dated September 8th, 1914, Eliot disclosed that war “has been something which has left a very deep impression on me” (Eliot, 1988). Compelled to experience the absurdity and the horror of World Wars I and II, T. S. Eliot post-war production patently records the desperate, private outpouring of a sensitive soul’s grief and fear, as well as the historical disillusionment and anxiety of an age in which the cultural collapse coincided with both an individual and a naturalistic disintegration. The aim of my paper is to investigate the environmental upheaval characterizing two poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot – The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943) – whose apocalyptic scenarios plainly exhibit “the devastating effects of the conflict on individual bodies and minds and the deadened landscape they inhabit” (Badenhausen, 2015). Indeed, by both portraying a barren territory and describing the ruins of an ‘Unreal’ London destroyed by air raids, the abovementioned poems display the natural disasters provoked by the two global bellicose events, functioning likewise as harbingers and warnings for the actual ‘death of earth’ and ecological crises (McIntire, 2015). After providing an overall insight into the texts, I will subsequently detect the way in which sterility and physical desolation imbue both the urban and the natural environment, unfolding the catastrophic aftermaths inflicted by those “mechanized mass slaughter[s]” (Rabaté, 2015) to such geographical ecosystems, meditating as well on their dramatic impact on the modern, industrialized world. Furthermore, I will attempt to demonstrate Eliot’s struggle to discover strategies for survival, revealing his striving for an ecological “meaning that would help resolve the catastrophes of the present” (McIntire, 2015).