COSMOPOLITANISM, ELITISM, AND MODERNISM IN T.S. ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND

            The Criterion, the quarterly literary journal in which The Waste Land originally appeared, was founded by Thomas Stearns Eliot under the patronage of British nobility, and the multinational authors found in its table of contents are indicative of the forward-thinking artistic community to which Eliot belonged. The first issue of The Criterion was modeled after other well-regarded literary journals of the era – including foreign publications such as La Nouvelle Revue Française – further connecting the magazine to the larger world of cutting-edge literature surrounding it. The Waste Land forms a bridge with Western culture as it existed before the first World War, alluding to historical cultural ideas and famously canonical texts. The poem also exists as a sort of avant-garde text, breaking away from accepted literary norms, yet still paradoxically framed by those the age old structures which promote and allow a cosmopolitan, elitist way of life. There is a tension between tradition, cosmopolitanism, elitism, and the modernist literary movement’s attempt to break open the canon and make “technical advance[s] of a new aesthetic” (Cooper), in which we see literature simultaneously embracing and shunning traditions, both contextually and textually. This poem and magazine were published in a period of transition, and so naturally, neither are either fully “beyond” the past; despite the new techniques being employed, which certainly qualify The Waste Land as being a modernist text, these techniques do not separate the text from the fact that it is intrinsically within the context of all literature and history which had come before it, and its contemporary context. Eliot did not reinvent the wheel. It could even be argued that there is as much of tradition within and outside of the text as there is “new” literary technique found within the text. This shows the importance of context and periodical studies when considering the initial introduction of a text into the world, and how it changes the way we perceive a text compared to viewing it out of context.