Peaster 1 William M. Peaster 20 April. 2012 “I have shored against my ruins”: Fragmentation in The Waste Land First published by the London based “The Criterion” in October 1922, The Waste Land is a reaction to the spiritual devastation found in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, a war caused by the nationalistic chaos of twentieth-century civilization. The poem does not react to a literal or physical devastation from the war, but to “the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man, the ‘waste’ of our civilization” which was not only capable of pointless atrocities such as the Battle of Somme, but morally culpable for them (Southam 126). The principal theme explored in the poem is the possibility of the Waste Land’s salvation, whether or not “emotional, spiritual, and intellectual vitality [could] be regained” for the myriad denizens that resided there (Southam 126). In this way, the Waste Land mimics the reality the citizens of the world post-World War I experienced: salvation (peace, vitality regained) was only a possibility and not a guarantee (more war, more strife). Eliot uses the “prosaic language of the huge cities of our century” in The Waste Land to mirror upon these “huge cities” precisely what they have become: emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually disrupted, or fragmented (qtd. in Hoover 14). In this regard, The Waste Land serves in a similar function to James Joyce’s Dubliners, as a “nicely polished looking-glass” wherein readers may become self-aware of the modern existential afflictions that have beset them (qtd. in Shashaty 214). Lyndall Gordon, author of Eliot’s Early Years, proposes that for Eliot “experienc[ing] the world as a waste land was a prerequisite to experiencing it in faith” (Southam 133). So in being a reaction to and reflection of the chaos of modernity, The Waste Land suggests that the only way to salvation was through necessary confrontation with the labyrinth of fragments and ruins that was twentieth-