T. S. 엘리엇의 『황무지』 또다시 읽기

A Re-reading of The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s status in the history of English poetry should be considered unique in that although we take for granted that all major anthologies include his poems, readers of many generations still do not fully “understand” them. While Eliot opened a new stage of English poetry by creating a representative modernist poetics, which placed him as a major precursor of High Modernism, he was recently regarded by deconstructionists or poststructuralists in particular as one whose text could embrace postmodernist features. The poetics of impersonality, supposedly a quintessential element to Eliot, has been questioned as well because of the poet’s newly highlighted autobiographical elements in his poems that we may find in “confessional” poetry. The seemingly timeless popularity and influence of his poetry, however, may need to be reconsidered since the heyday of postmodernist discourses and post World War II poetics have now passed. His experimental early poetics, represented in The Waste Land in particular, undoubtedly exercises highly complicated textuality that readers of the postmodern era should recognize as something to be shared in the late 20th century. Nevertheless, we can also detect a subtle distance between Eliot’s early poetics and postmodernist discourses/poetics. This essay does not purport to draw a clear boundary between modernism and postmodernism, and then place Eliot’s poetry in one category or the other. This will not be useful in helping readers approach the texts more effectively, especially one as complicated as The Waste Land whose complexity goes beyond the dichotomy between opposite perspectives or poetics. Rather, this essay will discuss what we can find or miss from a decontextualized reading of The Waste Land as a canonical text in the new century.