The Promised Land Project: Following the Whitman Trail through Eliot's Wasteland

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Following the Whitman Trail through Eliot's Wasteland

As noted in the previous two blog entries, the poetic genius of high modernism, as reflected in Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, had a strong, ambivalent reaction towards Whitman’s art and themes. Pound’s cohort, T.S. Eliot, would write The Wasteland during this time, a poem often heralded as the greatest poem of the twentieth-century.

My take on the The Wasteland is that of a reaction to the horrors of the First World War and reflects the ushering in of a new, misanthropic age. The narrator of the poem literally seems shell-shocked, a common ailment of the trench warfare of that time. Whereas the nineteenth-century sustained a certain degree of optimism in human progress, despite notable strains, following the outbreak of the First World War, faith in our human nature collapsed and to this day, we’re still trying to recover. To some degree, modern poetry, exalting art, became an esoteric refuge from the horrors of the twentieth-century.

The fall-out with Whitman reflects a fall-out with democracy and faith in the average working man and woman. Pound would look to Fascism, Lawrence to a nostalgic, aristocratic vision of the ancient Etruscans, and Eliot would continue to forge an aristocratic refuge in art. In the upheavals of the First and Second World War, arguably the beginning and end of one great upheaval, Whitman’s vision doesn’t fare so well. At the high-water mark of totalitarianism, George Orwell surmises in his 1940 classic essay, "Inside the Whale":

The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire.

While we know that democracy does survive this twentieth-century challenge, Whitman's vision gets roughed up as we attempt to take it into the twenty-first century.