What the Thunder Said: Environmental Agency in The Waste Land

Abstract

The working title of The Waste Land, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” has pointed critics towards voice as a central entry point to Eliot’s poem. Leonard Diepeveen explores the nuances of quotation and allusion,1 John Xiros Cooper considers the poem’s socioverbal context and its transformative action on sociolinguistic codes,2 Michael Levenson argues for considering scene instead of image as the context for the poem’s voices,3 and Alireza Farahbakhsh, among others, observes the fractured, elusive selfhood created by the poem’s lack of a central speaker.4 A new avenue which we might carve into the already well-lined critical map of voice in The Waste Land, however, is to move on, as Eliot did, from voice to land. That Eliot ultimately decided to name the poem The Waste Land after having nearly called it “He Do the Police in Different Voices” signals that his text is concerned with voice and land in nearly equal measure. That is, however, not to abandon entirely the poem’s perennially compelling questions of voice; those interested in voices in The Waste Land will find their readings enriched by considering them in connection with the poem’s equally compelling questions of land, which ecocritics have begun to take up in recent years. Scholars endeavoring to read The Waste Land ecocritically tend to gravitate to the idea of “waste.” Gabrielle McIntire uses Eliot’s representation of pollution to classify the poem as a “fallen post pastoral,” where nature has been compromised and thus cannot offer renewal, respite, or