Modernism and T.S Eliot

The Waste Land was published in London and New york in autumn 1922. Earlier in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses had been published. These two works, the poem and the novel, quickly came to be recognised as the central literary texts of modernism.

The Waste Land forces readers to face difficult questions concerning values, related to religion, morality, history and art. 

Are values communal or individual?

We, as readers, are addressed and interrogated by the poem and responses are demanded of us; the poem does not provide answers or solutions. 

Although it is obviously a construction of its time and incorporated itself contemporary developments in the visual arts, music, and cinema as well as literature, it continues to broadcast beyond its period of creation, beyond the twentieth century. 

No poet of any ambition since 1922 can afford to ignore The Waste Land, and no individual concerned with how to live a decent or significant life can ignore the challenge set by the poem.

Modernism designates the broad literary and cultural movement that spanned all of the arts and even spilled into politics and philosophy. Like Romanticism, Modernism was highly varied in its manifestations between the arts and even within each art. The dates when Modernism flourished are in dispute, but few scholars identify its genesis as being before 1860 and World War II is generally considered to mark an end of the movements height. Modernist art initially began in Europe's capitals, primarily London,Milan, Berlin, St. Petersburg and especially Paris; it spread to the cities of the United States and South America after World I; by the 1940s, Modernism had thoroughly taken over the American and European academy, where it was challenged by nascent Postmodernism in the 1960s.

In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction between "high" and "low" art. The educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for literature of all sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated Literati looked upon this new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist, producing nothing of commercial value for the market. It's worth mentioning that this alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by large turned their backs on many 'elitist' artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffection artists, as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the most effective poets and novelists did manage to make profound statements that were absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writers inner circles. in the later years of the modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream, as regionalism and identity politics became significant influences on the purpose and direction of artistic endeavor.