The Representations of Boredom in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

Boredom has been recognized as an important cultural symptom in the formation of modernism. Charles Baudelaire, who had affected to a remarkable extent upon modernism, was representatively a poet of “spleen” or in other words, “boredom.” It is widely conjectured that T. S. Eliot, who was once under the influence of Baudelaire, was interested in the problem of boredom as a socio-cultural phenomenon. There have been several terms that designate the similar meaning to boredom such as, melancholy, acedia, ennui and so on. As they are various, the individual meanings and usages are slightly different. However, it is widely acknowledged that the concept of boredom first emerged before and after the World Wars to be merged into modernity. Therefore, the problem of boredom shows the slice of human mentality in an industrialized and urbanized society that may expands into the existential problems. In this respect, The Waste Land shows the barren and sterile landscape of human mind after experiencing the World War, in which people had witnessed absurdity, meaninglessness of life, the sense of emptiness, and the overwhelming boredom. Eliot suggests lots of images of boredom in the poem, these images sometimes appear directively and other times by way of providing barren images of natural landscapes that metaphorize the human existential conditions. Most of such images are very much poetic; and also at the same time, they are the life conditions that modernist writers tried to express as the core essence of life in modernism. The Waste Land is one of the most representative texts that show this relationship between boredom and modernism.