Bacon and Eliot
been drawn to as he was not drawn to the granular effects of the poem; instead he found that it’s the ‘ whole atmosphere of it that affects one ’. 13
Alienation and the desolation of war are predominant themes in The Waste Land . Eliot originally wrote this poem after he suffered a mental breakdown at his bank manager job in London; he felt keenly the destruction and decay of the First World War and mourned the loss of innocence and spirituality. He pours those feelings into The Waste Land , and the resulting poem is a dark journey through a broken, devastated kingdom, a synecdoche for post-WWI Europe. The first section of the poem, ‘ Burial of the Dead ’ , is thick with references to death and a feeling of imprisonment or being trapped. Multiple allusions to the First World War and Germany lurk throughout reminding readers of WWI and its horrors:
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many 14
The images of this section are of the changes in seasons, the passing of time and the death of plants as spring turning to summer which in turn changes to fall, and then winter. He also mentions in this section that humanity is trapped in its own wasteland following the end of World War One:
Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. 15
Eliot is not talking about the actual ruins of war but the spiritual ruins of the people – frightened, bewildered, disillusioned. The glimpses of people seem to represent them as survivors living among the ruined buildings in a land where all the trees have been destroyed by artillery shells. It is this perspective that Bacon draws on in Three Figures at the Base of A Crucifixion [ Illustration 1 ], using Eliot’s Eumenides to reflect on the angst of post-war Europe.
Bacon’s mid -career, Sweeney Agonistes, and a more literal manifestation of Eliot’s poetic imagery
Sweeney Agonistes [ Illustration 2 ] was painted by Bacon in 1967 and is the only work of his that makes both a direct reference to Eliot’s work through its title ( it is named after Eliot’s 1933 play Sweeney Agonistes ). The curator Didier Ottinger states that the work ‘is an almost literal representation of this poem narrative’ . 16 This presents to us a departure from previous manifestations of Eliot’s poetry and
13 Ibid.: 174. 14 Eliot 1963: 65. 15 Ibid.: 63. 16 The Centre Pompidou, 2019.
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