No one particularly. The poem was written at a time of
turmoil, in the aftermath of World War I, and its fragmented structure is reflective of
the terrible sense of disorder that Eliot and his contemporaries must have experienced.
T.S. Eliot named Jessie L. Weston's book: Ritual to Romance (1920)
as the source for the title, structure and some of the symbolism of his poem. Yet, it is
difficult to weigh the extent of the influence of Weston's analysis of the myth of the
Holy Grail on The Wasteland, for Ritual to Romance
was published several months after Eliot had made it known that he had been
working on The Wasteland (The original title of the poem was
He Do the Police in Different Voices.). Weston in her book took a
historical approach and described the development of some of the fertility rites of
ancient Greece and the Near East into the medieval tales of the quest for the Holy
Grail. Eliot in The Wasteland tried to work backwards, reaching out
to their religious sources from within the legends themselves. In her study, Jessie L.
Weston placed a special focus on the motif of the Waste Land the fruitfulness of which
could have been restored by the finding of the Holy Grail. It is not difficult to
imagine that what Eliot tried to accomplish through his poem was to locate a source that
may have contributed to the rejuvenation of the degenerate society and culture of his
time. This may be an explanation for his eventual choice of Wasteland as the title of
his poem.
You can read Jessie L. Weston's book
online:
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