Rituals of Spring in Hope Mirlees’s Paris and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

The paper offers the comparative study of two poems: Paris by Hope Mirrlees (1920) and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922). The research aims to consider Paris as one of the key works of modernist poetry and a possible model for The Waste Land. The author of the paper turns to some parallels confirming the similarity of these two poetic texts. Particular attention is paid to the “anthropological” or “ritualistic” mode of both poems. The philosophical concept and poetic structure of these poems were based on the ideas presented in the books and research papers by the representatives of Cambridge anthropological school (J.G. Frazer, J.E. Harrison, J.L. Weston, etc.). Both poems could be considered in the context of modern anthropological and psychoanalytic theories. The ritualistic mode of the texts not only provides scientific grounds for the embodiment of personal and collective experience in poetry but creates a powerful vital impulse inherent in those archaic rituals, the elements of which were reconstructed by the poets. The works of J.G. Frazer, J.E. Harrison, J.L. Weston, and others help the readers to comprehend and expand the content of certain episodes, clarify “dark” places, to see a harmonious poetic structure and sophisticated concept of the world order, civilization and man behind the external arbitrariness and fragmentation. Both Paris and The Waste Land became manifestations and embodiments of the “mythological method” articulated by Eliot in 1923.

Keywords

• t.s. eliot
• hope mirrlees
• modernist poetic epic
• ritual
• cambridge anthropologists
• mythological method
• rebirth pattern