‘You ought to be ashamed’: Sexuality in Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

This essay argues that Eliot’s seminal modernist classic The Waste Land depicts sexuality as a predominantly negative force, and is much influenced by Buddhist philosophy in this regard. Specifically, it argues that Eliot’s poem portrays sexuality as negative insofar as it perpetuates supposedly monstrous cycles of human existence, precipitates suffering, and elicits a regression of the self.