Eliot’s The Waste Land and Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night: Exploring a Cityscape and a Soundscape

Abstract

Starting with Eliot’s own acknowledgement of a particular debt toward James Thomson, this study closely compares Eliot’s The Waste Land and Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, and examines how the two poets’ interest in London as a subject is manifested in their works and how the cityscape is embodied in each poem. It may be easy to find the thematic similarities from the sterile urban settings between the two poems: the speaker(s)’ quest, the hellish city reality, and the pessimistic overtones. Based on a detailed analysis of both poems, this paper also discusses the types of factors that make The Waste Land a modernist poem, and The City of Dreadful Night a Victorian poem regardless of the differing eras to which each author belongs. The particularized visual images and the acoustic modernity of The Waste Land will be emphasized, as its fragmented sonic dimension including its polyglot and dissonant idioms, songs and noises, and its differing and diverse voices, is strikingly innovative and unique.