Artigo Revisado por pares

Theravada Buddhist Influence in The Waste Land?

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/notesj/gjp085

ISSN

1471-6941

Autores

Lheisa Dustin,

Tópico(s)

Irish and British Studies

Resumo

ALTHOUGH we know about Eliot's Pali courses at Harvard and subsequent interest in Theravada Buddhism, many critics judge Buddhism's influence in The Waste Land as incidental. However, Stephen Spender's 1975 report that Eliot told the Buddhist poet Gabriela Mistral that at the time he was writing the poem, he ‘seriously considered’ becoming a Buddhist,1 and Eliot's 1933 claim that his embrace of ‘Brahmin and Buddhist philosophy’ at this time was checked only by what he saw as the concomitant necessity of ‘forgetting to think and feel as an American or a European’, suggest a need to revisit the critical consensus that Buddhism does not play a major role in the poem.2 While Eliot had a wider base for his knowledge of Pali scriptures than Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translations, which he cites in his note to line 308 of ‘The Fire Sermon’, this book alone supports my argument for the strong presence of these scriptures in The Waste Land. My contention is that parts III and V of The Waste Land borrow ideas and images from them in such a way that an asymmetry between Christian and Buddhist modes of salvation emerges as one of the poem's main concerns.

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