Nature in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Critical Ecolinguistic Study
Ecolinguistics, a relatively new sub-discipline of linguistics, is mainly based on the Sapir-Whorfian ideology of linguistic determinism which claims that the way we use language shapes our interactions with the environment. It is the study of “the life-sustaining relationships of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment, with a normative orientation towards protecting the systems that humans and other forms of life depend on for their well-being and survival” (Alexander and Stibbe 105). The relations of humans with other species and the physical environment are of great importance, since the continuation of all life depends on these ecological relationships. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is a frantic sincere expression of an agonized poetic soul to find out the means of getting rid of the mechanized stony cruelty-ridden modern life. The poem begins with a shocking sentential expression ‘April is the cruelest month breeding,’ but ends with the three-time asyndetic repetition of noun ‘shantih’ which a human being desires most. The present paper is a preliminary attempt to analyze and explore the poem from the perspective of ecolinguistics and to exhibit how poetic expression takes turns in depicting the integral relationship between all the constituents of environment affected by the ‘cruelest’ materialism and repaired by the peace-giving spiritualism.