Opposing Trajectories: Juxtaposition, Simultaneity, and Spatial Form in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

The present paper examines two opposing voices in “The Burial of the Dead” the opening section of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: one lyrical, dense, and inwardly expressive; the other expansive, rhetorical, and outwardly declarative. It ultimately argues that these two voices constitute the poem's central modernist gesture. Drawing on Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form, the paper demonstrates how these two voices should be perceived not linearly, as expected from narrative sequencing, but simultaneously, as two juxtaposed images within the poem's spatial structure. This subversion of temporal and spatial aesthetics is deeply rooted in modernist response to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is his contemporary history, to use Eliot’s rigorous diagnosis. Although their discourses are entirely opposing, the poet and the prophet’s voices converge on the same bleak desolation: the same physical and spiritual ruin. It is in this violent collision of two irreconcilable trajectories arriving at a single shared image that Eliot most fully realizes the modernist aesthetic of juxtaposition and spatial form.