Art exaggerates life. It examines, abstracts, glorifies, distils, or unpacks all of our experiences. Poets wrap the everyday in eloquence. Movies explore the human condition. Painters colour a moment with mood. Yet, sometimes, in the process, something of life is missed. When art sees only bucolic meadows, it misses the reality of grimy metropolises, suffocating in a greyish haze.

This is exactly what T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” looked to remedy. In its seething, swirling maze of broken voices, there emerges something about life that art often misses.

Nowadays, we seem to love a dystopia. We can’t get enough of Mad Max, Fallout, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, Black Mirror, and so on. If art reflects the times, it seems there’s a darkness to our collective psyche, and The Waste Land captures this perfectly.
Eliot saw the cold, harsh reality of “modernity”, where soldiers returned from the war without limbs, blinded and disfigured by gas attacks. He saw the vast claustrophobic cities with people shuffling to unhappy jobs, more drone than human.

Eliot’s poem can be confusing, because it’s laced with classical, religious, and literary references, from Shakespeare and Dante, to Hindu folk tales. Yet the poem is still to be enjoyed, as something *experienced* more than read. Treat it like wrapping yourself in a comfy blanket of gloom. See it as listening in on the world.

Eliot presents us with a disorientating, busy, tense, and haunting cast of dissonant voices, like the background noise to a macabre café. It’s to imagine you’re the city, listening in on all the lonely, afraid people, and their private nightmares. Some hidden, some hauntingly clear. In Eliot’s phrase, it’s to see the world as a “heap of broken images”.

The Waste Land makes more sense when seen as a whole, where individual lines or walk-on parts form a collage of a dying world. It’s a world of happy memories in a dark today, where the sight of spring’s tulips makes us poignantly sad. It’s bleak and unnerving, and we’re not sure why. How better to describe our more morose moments? When the suffocating weight of modern life falls hardest on us, how else can we describe it but as The Waste Land?