Eliot context

Eliot and sex

For Eliot, bad sex was a symptom of failed civilisation.
Eliot was concerned that modern urban experience - which entrained sexual liberation partly as a result of the emancipation of women during WWI, would 'damage the soul'. He was repulsed by these levels of sexaul liberation.

What concerns did Eliot and Hardy share regarding a fear of modernisation?

Both were concerned that the industrialised country's focus on 'progress' above anything else would result in destructively uproot tradition.

James McFarlane

'Modernism...is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos.’

What were some effects on society after ww1

A sense of aimlessness and apathy in modern society. The war had exposed the inadequacies of the ruling elite and many had lost their religious faith as a result of the horrors they had witnessed. The emotional and spiritual sterility of the western and is what Eliot saw as the ‘wasteland’ of our civilisation. For Eliot, modern society lacked a spiritual centre.

What did Eliot call modern life

‘a fragmentary mess’

Peter Ackroyd

Eliot had ‘visions of madness in a disintegrating world.

B Rajan

Eliot is ‘Keenly aware of the disorder, the futility, the meaningless, the mystery of life and suffering’

Literary Apocolypse

…In what Goldstein called ‘a literary apocalypse’, Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1922 that also saw other groundbreaking modernist publications such as Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, and Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, who, like Eliot, focus on a sense of alienation and dislocation in a fast changing world