1

Boredom as modern sentiment in The Waste Land

Sunghyun Kim
Seoul National University of Technology
As has been mentioned in the previous chapter and explained so far, The Waste Land contains the
elements of melancholy that are the aesthetics of fragmentation, emphasis upon boredom, reinterpretation
of the conventional concept of time, the recognition of lost totality and the dehumanized life conditions.
From now on, how The Waste Land presents and represents such factors of melancholy will be illustrated.
Eliot says, poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape from personality (Eliot, Tradition and Individual Talent 10).
However, interestingly enough, in his article, The Social Function of Poetry in On Poetry and Poets, Eliot
talks about the inseparable relationships between feelings and poetry, which cannot be properly
communicated through if translated. Furthermore, he claims that the duty of a poet is to make his readers
share consciously in new feelings which they had not experienced before (The Social Function of Poetry 9).
Considering that an escape from emotion is the poetic essence of what Eliot thinks modernist literature
aims at, we arrive to a rather paradoxical conclusion. What Eliot tries to express is no other than the feeling
of an escape from emotion. That is to say, Eliot seems to be emphasizing the importance of feelings by
trying to negate the emotions and feelings. Furthermore, in Knowledge and Experience, Eliot argues the
immediate experience, which means the complete understanding of the world, is not possible: And
although immediate experience is the foundation and the goal of our knowing, yet no experience is only
immediate (KE 18). It is only recognized by our unreal abstractions (KE 18) and we have to admit the
limitations of empirical recognition because reality and validity of experience come from such unreal
abstractions. According to Eliot, every experience is just the result of arbitrary, limited point of view
perceived from finite centers. Therefore, in the truest sense, feelings from immediate experience seem to
be beyond human perception; all feelings may be regarded as arbitrary and relative. In this vein, incapability
of feelings appears as the form of paralysis, boredom, ennui or sometimes absurdity in Eliots poems and
these symptoms are all related with melancholy.
The intimate relationship between modernism and melancholy can be partly clarified and elucidated by
how the socio-cultural significance of boredom affected modernism. As Patricia Meyer Spacks and Reinhard
Kuhn insist boredom became an important phenomenon in the twentieth century, boredom is a useful
concept that helps understand modernism which posits an isolated subject existing in a secularized,
fragmented world marked by lost or precarious traditions (Spacks 219). Its semantic relative ennui, another
term for designating boredom, was widely prevalent in the same period (Kuhn 373). Reinhard Kuhn
discovers that ennui plays an important role in Western literature. Along with melancholy, its semantic
cognates such as acedia, boredom and ennui play a crucial role in determining the mood of modernism.
According to him, ennui is not just one of the various themes but a dominant theme in the twentieth century
(Kuhn 331). The sudden increase of melancholy and ennui as a cultural symptom apparently results mainly

from the twentieth century modernization and urbanization, which brought about sheer upheaval in modern
society (Andrew Solomon 31). Kuhn asserts that the synthesis of melancholy and ennui provides the
aesthetic background for artists to create their masterpieces such as Marcel Proust and T. S. Eliot (373). 1
Similarly, inspecting how boredom functioned in the process of modernization, Elizabeth Goodstein sees
boredom as a form of subjective malaise proper to modernity and an urban phenomenon (Goodstein 18)
that is a universal and all-pervasive experience, a fundamental way in which human beings relate to the
world (Goodstein 46). For Goodstein, boredom is a symptom of modernization and it shows how
subjective significance of modernization is reflected (124) in modernism. As subjective experience in
modernity, boredom, ennui, acedia, and melancholy are all semantic cognates as their etymological
evidence attests, which shall be seen later. They all share the element of sorrow, 2 which is assumed to be
the central aspect in the mechanism of melancholy.
In addition, considering the issue of boredom plays a crucial role in Eliots early poems, the sense of
lost totality can be viewed in terms of the sense of ennui. As melancholy has been discussed in the context
where the totality collapsed, ennui also deals with the world which is emptied of its significance (Kuhn 12):
music is no longer an aesthetic world of sound, but a series of notes. Instead of a painting, one sees only
a conglomeration of meaningless colors on a canvas; a book becomes a series of words (Kuhn 12-13).
Kuhn defines ennui as the state of emptiness which is the immediate consequence of the encounter with
nothingness (13), that governs the overall ambience of Eliots early poems.
Eliot describes metropolis by providing partly iconographical imagery and partly symbolic imagery,
which evokes the vivid image of the landscape of the city slum (Hargrove 37) fraught with the melancholic
atmosphere such as the boredom, meaninglessness, and sordidness of human life (37) which can be
detected in his early poems such as Preludes, Portrait of a Lady and Rhapsody on a Windy Night, not to
mention his major poems, Prufrock and The Waste Land.
The sense of emptiness, therefore, originally comes from such frustration of the split of the world. As
we can see at the end of the poem, Prufrock cannot escape the social self bound by time, following a cycle
1As a matter of fact, Eliot expressed his keen sense of boredom not only in The Waste Land but also in his unfinished
poem, Fragment of Agon: DORIS: Id be bored.
SWEENEY:
Youd be bored.
Birth, and copulation, and death.
DORIS: Id be bored.
SWEENEY:
Youd be bored.
Birth, and copulation, and death (T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot 122).

2
Reinhard Kuhn explains the etymological meaning of ennuis twelfth-century form, Eneas, with the word ennui which is
used to designate a profound sorrow (5). Stanley Jackson also emphasizes the fact that acedia was conceived as a
profound or depressing sorrow, which was viewed as the sin that subsumed dejection or sorrow in the scheme of
cardinal sins (70). And these states of dejection came to be viewed as melancholy during the medieval centuries
(Jackson 76). Subsequently, images that had traditionally portrayed acedia came to be used to portrayed melancholy
(Jackson 76). This explains the common visual elements of boredom, melancholy, depression and melancholy (Peter
Toohey 41). They are all represented by the typical position in which the head rests on the forearms (Toohey 13).

of days and hours in fixed and pointless activity (Gish 17). The perpetually recurrent events generate the
overwhelming sense of boredom, and it ultimately provokes melancholy. The conflict between two
irreconcilable worlds is not resolved: His inner self could dwell in that sea; his outer self would never enter
it. Unable to join his two selves he can neither live there nor escape its call (Gish 17). This neither / nor
situation has a lot to do with being indecisiveness which has been regarded as the prominent feature of the
melancholic. However, Gish concludes that this unbridgeable gap between the selves governed by feeling
and thought is resolved by Eliots theory of impersonality (22). Because it is impossible to compromise
feelings and thoughts, Gish contends, Eliot chose to turn away from feeling (22), which fits to the previous
discussion about the relationship between modernity and the problem of emotion. Although her conclusion
to connect the background thoughts in Prufrock to Eliots poetics sounds interesting, it would have been
much better if she could have reached to the point of realizing the importance of melancholy. Meanwhile,
Kuhn has appropriately pointed out that J. Alfred Prufrock is a good example that provide[s] a rich source of
material for the study of ennui (337) which is another side of melancholy. In a sense, it is ironic that even
though Eliot tries to escape such feelings and emotions, he, after all, reaches the point of expressing
melancholy by proposing the bowler-hatted, expressionless men (Kuhn 337) as an allegorical figure of
melancholy in metropolis.
It has been revealed that the importance of acedia, a conceptual form of modern boredom is in close
conjunction with the discourse of melancholy. The concept of acedia dates back to the medieval period,
when the exactly measured recognition of time by tolling bells at the monastery gave monks the
extraordinary feeling of being trapped in repetitive time. Considering the relationship between boredom
caused by eternal repetitiveness and melancholy, the concept of acedia seems to play an important role in
determining melancholy. Along with acedia, time also plays a crucial role in melancholy, which Eliot shows
with a lot of fragmentary images in his poems. In order to clearly understand the meanings of images and
metaphors of the poems, Panofskys iconographic guidance and other psychological references have been
referred to and helped interpret the poems in the frame of discourse of melancholy. In this way, Eliots early
major poems such as Prufrock, Portraid of a Lady, Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night have been
analyzed to demonstrate that they present the elements of melancholy in the background setting of everyday
life in the city, which provides the undercurrent consistency through The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

The Waste Land describes the city as filled with so many living dead. The public watch makes a sound
of passing time, which reminds people of their destined mortality. This atmosphere is intimately linked with
Baudelaires sentiments. As Eliot explains in his Notes for The Waste Land, the city is the place where
specters are grabbing people by the sleeves: Fourmillante cit, cit pleine de reves, O le spectre en plein
jour raccroche le passant (76). This image from Baudelaire paves a way to the compound ghost in Four

Quartets in that they arouse the image of melancholic horror represented by being unreal. Also, it is a
portrait of the modern mentality, what Eliot called visions of the horror and glory ( The Use of Poetry and

the Use of Criticism 196). Melancholy has close affinity with horror and glory as its core essence in that
melancholy arouses deep-rooted horror of mortality. As for this, Helen Gardner points out that how the

element of horror and terror are interwoven in The Waste Land:

Up to The Waste Land the movement is from what might be called boredom
to something that might be called terror, alternating with its more
disinterested companion, horror; or, more truly, since terror and horror are
present from the beginning, the poetry shows a deepening sense of horror
in which boredom is swallowed up. (The Art of T. S. Eliot 80)
Melancholy is a psychological response to loss and The Waste Land describes the situation where we are
losing a human essence, a significant historical narrative, communal relation, social purpose and
private fulfillment through being in love (Easthope 175). In the age of urbanization and industrialism, life
seems to be much more affluent, but the truth may be opposite. Conditions of life may have become much
more convenient, but the whole life may have become inconvenient as much. Everything in the city is
designed and built according to the exact plan and usage. Life gets to be measured exactly like a cog in a
machine. As for this, Hugo Friedrich describes the penetrating mood of The Waste Land as following:
The emotion penetrates the objective correlative-- that is, images as well
as human and objective actions. But which images and which actions? Eliot
remarks that the essential features of the present day are impermanence
and extreme polarity; and these features are the inherent characteristics of
his poetic technique. Admittedly, his practice fits in with modern
civilization, which, with its complications, contradictions, and nervous
sensations, demands a poetry that is comprehensive and yet that speaks
allusively and indirectly and will thus inevitably be difficult. Early in The

Waste Land, we come across the phrase: . . . for you know only/ A heap of
broken images. . . ; and, toward the end, These fragments I have shored
against my ruins. These lines may be taken as profession of fragmentism,
the law of Eliots poetry. (Friedrich 158)
Fragmentism as the literary strategy of The Waste Land could be regarded as a manifestation of the modern
civilization. Many symbols of drought and rain, sterility and rebirth (Easthope 174), Easthope suggests, are
used to indicate the fact that the development of modern life, urbanization and industrialism, has cut the
people off from their roots and brought them to a state of self-consciousness, boredom, automatism,
anomie, spiritual death (174). Accordingly, The Waste Land presents various imageries of boredom, horror,
and melancholy, all of which contribute to expressing dark and gloomy side of the city.
Elizabeth S. Goodstein considers boredom as an important factor that constitutes modernism. According to
her, boredom had already emerged as a mass phenomenon as early as the mid-nineteenth century under
the influence of industrialization and urbanization. Because boredom affected the nineteenth century writers,
artists, scientists, historians, and social reformers, it appeared in a wide variety of critical, descriptive, and
aestheticizing discourses on the subjective effects of modernization (Goodstein 101). Moreover, Kuhn
suggests that the twentieth century is a rich source of material for the study of ennui,(337) which provides

clues to understanding boredom. According to the definition of ennui, it is possible to conjecture that
boredom of the nineteenth century appears in the name of ennui and melancholy until modernism in the
twentieth century. Defining ennui as the immediate outcome of the confrontation with nothingness, Kuhn
lists important symptoms of ennui: the obsession with death, the lack of involvement, monotony,
immobility, and a total distortion of the sense of time (13), all of which could be applied to melancholy as
has been revealed. The concept of boredom goes along with ennui and its cultural impact reaches the
culmination in the form of melancholy. Given such recognition, it is possible to say, boredom is to the
nineteenth century is what melancholy is to the twentieth century; as a metaphysical malady (Spacks 180),
boredom, ennui, acedia, and melancholy are all emotional cognates that significantly influenced upon
modernism.
i. Acedia and Its Psychological Cognates
According to Robert Burton, melancholy has been regarded as just an extraordinary psychological status
accompanied by a series of symptoms, such as extreme polarity, acedia, and lethargy, usually accompanied
by fear and sorrow (79). In addition, Benjamin points out that the similarity between the condition of the
melancholic and the state of rabies is not accidental. He adds on, according to ancient tradition, the
spleen is dominant in the organism of the dog (Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama 152), an
animal that symbolizes the sloth, or lethargy in allegorical paintings. In many cases, dogs appear with
allegorical theme of melancholy. Klibansky and Panofsky regard the dog as a symbol of Saturn that
belonged to the typical portraits of scholars (Saturn and Melancholy 322). As has been explained, the
wisdom of Saturn is associated with the knowledge of scholars, and this also evokes the image of boredom.
That could partly explain why so many paintings of the medieval period contain the dog in order to express
the theme of melancholy. In this context, the ending part of Part I of The Waste Land clearly shows such
iconographical imagery that combines the motif of death and acedia:
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
O Keep the Dog far hence, thats friend to men,
Or with his nails hell dig it up again!
You! Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, - mon frre!
(The Waste Land 71-76)
This passage contains the core icons of melancholy: death, rebirth, dog, and ennui. The last line comes
from Baudelaires poem that directly deals with the problem of ennui. Baudelaires passage goes as
following whose context is unmistakably focused upon the melancholy. The poems goes as following:
C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil charg d'un pleur involontaire,
II rve d'chafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre dlicat,

-- Hypocrite lecteur, -- mon semblable, -- mon frre!

Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams
Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother.
You know this dainty monster, too, it seems-Hypocrite reader! -- You! -- My twin! -- My brother! (To the Reader 4)
According to the context from which Eliot borrows the line, the dominant image seems to be related with

ennui or boredom. The sense of ennui must have been an essential emotion3(Eliot, Hamlet and his
problems 99) one of which dominates the overall atmosphere of Baudelaires poetics as can be seen in his

Flowers of Evil. Kuhn indicates that acedia, or ennui is inextricably linked with the notion of time and space
(5). In a state of acedia, time is felt to be so slow (Kuhn 51), which frequently happens in repetitive
everyday life. Ennui, even though it has an etymological origin different from acedia, has various derivations
such as nausea, noxia, and non gioia (Kuhn 5). According to Kuhn, the concept of ennui became an
important idea in the early Christian era. The flourishing of Christianity was accompanied by the introduction
of a new concept of time (Kuhn 39), which is no other than what Gish points out earlier: the linear time
different from that of antiquity (Kuhn 39). Newly burgeoning interest in acedia coincided with the inception
of one of the most significant movements in Christian history, that of monasticism (Kuhn 40). The life of
monastery, as Kuhn describes, is instantly associated with solitude, fasting, and self-inflicted punishment
(40). In this vein, ennui, acedia, and boredom are in the same category.
Peter Toohey, who illustrates how boredom affects modern life, provides a useful example that can
connect boredom, ennui, nausea and melancholy. According to him, Jean-Paul Sartres novel, Nausea, which
is known for its dealing with the subject of existential boredom (29), was originally intended to be titled,
Melancholy (29).4 According to the accepted etymology, ennui comes from the Latin odium or odio
which means an object of hate. Furthermore, in the twelfth-century, ennui was used to designate a
profound sorrow (Kuhn 5), which fits into the cognates of melancholy: sorrow, acedia, and ennui. Those
similar yet different feelings consist of the main emotional atmosphere in metropolis. In this vein, Eliots
quotation from Baudelaire plays an important role in maintaining the undercurrent theme of melancholy in

The Waste Land. Boredom is synonymous with acedia which has a long history of being associated with
monks melancholy. Kuhn explains more about ennui in western literature by indicating how ennui and
melancholy are related with so-called acedia. Acedia was regarded as a disease by medieval monks
probably because they could feel the interminable quality that the hours and even the minutes take on
(Kuhn 51) in their recluse lives. As such, acedia, ennui, time, and melancholy are all closely related with
3
Recalling that Eliot puts much importance upon the emotion, that essential feeling of The Waste Land can be inferred
to be melancholy.
4
Peter Toohey takes a couple of more examples that can represent boredom. He mentions Gustave Faluberts Madame
Bovary and Albert Camus The Outsider as iconic books that show existential boredom (Toohey 29).

each other.
More specifically, Stanley Jackson traces back to the origin of the word, acedia. The Latin acedia was
transliterated from the Greek whose meanings are heedlessness, sluggishness, torpor, literally
non-caring-state (Jackson 65). There occurred various spelling forms such as accidia, accedia, acidia,

accidie, accydye, acedy and the term has been fixed as acedia in modern writings (Jackson 65). The import
of acedia was expanded to include carelessness, weariness, exhaustion, apathy, anguish, sadness, low
spirits, and sloth or negligence from excessive attention to worldly matters (Jackson 66). As stated, acedia
has been deeply related with the state of dejection, sadness, sorrow (Jackson 66), and some modern
authors regard acedia as synonymous with melancholia (66). Jackson points out that acedia has been
conceived as depression sorrow from the early twelfth century on, probably because acedia was viewed as
the sin that subsumed dejection or sorrow in the scheme of cardinal sins (70). According to Jackson,

acedia takes on two contrasting aspects of sloth and sorrow: Thus sorrow or dejection could be viewed as
the state of mind and the slothful behavior as the external manifestation (72). The significant relationship
between acedia and melancholy goes back to the fact that the status of dejection conceived of as acedia
comes to be regarded as melancholy during the medieval centuries (Jackson 76) because acedia and
melancholy have common factors such as sorrow, grief, and unhappiness. As a result, images that had
traditionally portrayed acedia came to be used to portray melancholy (Jackson 76). These connotative
meanings of acedia and melancholy are converged into the Saturn myth because Saturn is not only the
slowest planet (sloth, idle) but also embedded with melancholy as well.
Agamben points out the prominent feature of melancholy by saying, reciprocal penetration of sloth and
melancholy (Stanzas 13). That is to say, acedia was regarded as a mental state of despondency, lethargy,
and discouragement that distracted a solitary monk from his duties (Radden 69). Because of its causing
delinquency among monks, it was considered as one of the deadly sins: vainglory, anger, dejection, acedia,
pride, covetousness, gluttony, and fornication (Radden 70). Radden indicates that acedia is a sin of special
significance in that it had a redemptive aspect (70) because the victory over acedia brought joy, the
highest of all the virtues, and the state associated with mystical union with God (70). Considering the last
part of The Waste Land, which is associated with a form of a prayer for elevated bliss, the relationship
between acedia and melancholy seems quite intimate in that it reinforces the importance of melancholy in
the poem more and more.
The metropolis is the space where melancholy could burgeon the most, since it is the place of
loneliness, boredom, and a lot of anonymous deaths. In The Fire Sermon, people are described as trapped
with boredom and loneliness of the city life:
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference. (The Waste Land 235-242)
Northrop Frye regards being bored and tired as the full horror of denial of humanity (52), and
indifference is an indication of peoples passivity and the status of being bored. They are not motivated in
their life; they are contingent upon others. They just keep on living with automatic hand which would
symbolize the lack of willingness in their life.
The close relationship between time measuring and the sense of ennui became much more evident in
the nineteenth and the twentieth century when people were surrounded by a lot of timepieces that signaled
every important occasion in their lives. Most of all, mass-producing factories are operated by exactly
measured time in order to maximize the productivity. This helps mass-produced boredom in modern life.
The problem of boredom has been a very significant phenomenon especially in the twentieth century modern
world as mentioned before. Life in the modern city highly tends to be repeated by week, month, and year.
Toohey, tracing back the history of boredom, recognizes that modernized time has brought unprecedented
boredom to the people by the imposition of the white colonizations clocks, calendars which deprived
people of their ability to live in the present, and introduce them to a world of divided time where boredom
lurks in its interstices (157). No matter how hard people struggle to escape from it, they end up being
trapped in time, which eventually provokes the sense of loss, being alienated from the essence of life and
disjointed from the world.
As has been indicated in the definition of acedia, the medieval monks suffered from the feeling that the
time stopped for good at the culminating point of acedia. The feeling of eternal boredom in which everything
is felt to have completely stopped was accepted not so much bliss or redemption as a kind of punishment.
Historically, boredom was actually associated with the concept of punitive status. Accordingly, eternity or
infinity is not necessarily bliss or benediction, even though humans have been implicitly seeking for it. As
Gaston Bechelard expresses the feeling of being incarcerated by infinity in his Poetics of Space (221),5
humans are not only confined by the limited space and finite time but also by infinite space and eternal time
as well. That is the most fundamental dilemma of human ontology.
According to above observations, we have reached the tentative conclusion that Eliot seems to be
contradicting in his poetics and The Waste Land. Even though The Waste Land has been regarded as a
culmination point that manifests Eliots poetics, actually, it also contains lots of factors that go against his
own impersonal theory.
5
Bachelard expresses this idea by quoting a couple of lines from Supervielles poem: Too much space smothers us much
more than if there were not enough. And he adds on, In another text by Supervielle, which Christian Snchal points
out in his book on Supervielle, the prison is outside. After endless rides on the South American
pampas, Supervielle wrote : precisely because of too much riding and too much freedom, and of the
unchanging horizon, in spite of our desperate gallopings, the pampa assumed the aspect of a prison
for me, a prison that was bigger than the others. (The Poetics of Space 221). The idea of infinity and eternity
might be reversed with the shift of perspectives. Infinity and eternity may not be heavenly bliss. It could also produce
melancholy as the recognition of being finite and mortality does.