‘It is impossible to say just what I mean’: The Waste Land as Transcendent Meaning

Abstract

The end of the transition from the imaginative mind of the Romantic Age to the imaginative mind of the Modern Age is as surely signalled in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ as William Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ announces the commencement. Nowhere is the distinction between the burgeoning optimism over the possibilities of the human imagination and the closing resignation to the severe limits on the same better exhibited than in the contrast to be found between Wordsworth’s professed faith in time’s capacity to provide the thinking, feeling human creature with ‘abundant recompense’ for his lost innocence and spontaneity, on the one hand, and, on the other, Eliot’s observation that the meaning derived after the fact from experience is one that can never be ‘assigned to happiness’.