A Broken Coriolanus: Self and the Renaissance in T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land”

Abstract

From the celebration of human understanding in the Enlightenment towards the birth of a liberal capitalist world view, Post-Renaissance Western Europe has always fostered ideologies predicated upon Renaissance individualism: the liberty, sanctity and the reality of the individual self. The disillusionment of the modern time nonetheless had an obvious perverting impact on the Self who, by now divested of all glorious visions of future to strive at, stood imprisoned in the centrality of its own alienated existence. T.S. Eliot attempts to find this schizoid self and the memories of its origin in the mires of “The Waste Land”. The article argues that Eliot’s constant allusions to that past is not simply a jeremiad lamenting the present but also an agonizing reminder of the impossibility of returning to the Renaissance Individualism of unbridled ambition and optimism, attesting the failure of its legacy in the modern age of alienated individualism.