This paper investigates the auditory imagination employed in The Waste Land, Eliot’s musical poem as well as the greatest modernist canon. Through Eliot’s auditory imagination, The Waste Land is woven throughout by musicality, jazz rhythms and rhythmical rhyme quoted or adapted from the following sources: Wagner’s two operas, Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung, Verlaine’s “Parsifal,” the “Shakespeherian Rag,” the Australian soldiers’ ballad of World War I, and a nursery rhyme. The Waste Land also consists of a remarkable variety of auditory imagery, which reveals the significance and symbolism of the poem. For example, the auditory imagery employed includes the conversation or monologue of the speakers, the songs of the swallow and nightingale, the song of the hermit-thrush represented as the sound of water, the murmuring sound in the air signifying Pieta, the cry of a cock, and the thundering sound, “DA,” which is interpreted in Sanskrit as “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata.” This auditory imagery emphasizes the theme of the poem: immoral sexuality in the waste land is death, and the need for salvation from it. In conclusion, this variety of musicality and auditory imagery should be thoroughly traced by the reader to properly appreciate the complicated modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, which is interwoven exquisitely by Eliot’s auditory imagination. In addition, for better appreciation the reader must simultaneously probe into the visual imagery, olfactory imagery and synaesthesiac imagery as well as auditory imagery in the poem.

• 안중은(안동대학교) | Joong-Eun Ahn