Greening 'The Waste Land': Weaving T. S. Eliot's carpet into environmental literary criticism's patchwork quilt

Critics often read T.S. Eliot's prose as an objective correlative, where characters and settings operate as concrete symbols of abstract ideas. My thesis examines The Waste Land's setting not as a symbol but an actual location. I argue that Eliot depicts London, particularly the Thames, as polluted by human agency, and this reading allows The Waste Land to be read as environmental literary criticism. I conclude that Anfortas's question "Shall I at least set my lands in order" at the conclusion of The Waste Land offers Eliot's solution to urban pollution: individuals must recognize the impact they have on their environments and make a commitment to reverse it (425).;Eliot combines vegetation mythology and shipwreck imagery as a dual motif. I explore how this motif recurs in environmentally-oriented works for millennia, where shipwreck imagery emblematizes the collapse of society and vegetation mythology provides the symbol of societal rebirth. This project explores the motif's progression through classical, medieval, and Elizabethan literature, and I conclude that Eliot's allusions to these texts reveal that he was aware of this motif, as evidenced by the motif's incorporation into The Waste Land.