T. S. Eliot, Modernism, and Boredom

From Wyndham Lewis’s Blast to Ezra Pound’s injunction that modern artists must “make NEW” the traditions of art, literary modernism often branded itself with the rhetoric of novelty, energetic liberation, and daring experimentation. Whether celebrating Stephen Dedalus’s non serviam, applauding the virtuosic literary cubism of Gertrude Stein, or puzzling together the fragmented components of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, critics of modernism rightly emphasize the momentous and revolutionary watershed of new experimentation across the arts at the beginning of the twentieth century. The discourse of modernism’s newness, its ability to subvert convention, has filtered into literary history so thoroughly