Building an Unreal City: Reading the Construction of St. Louis in Eliot's The Waste Land

In 1959, T. S. Eliot said of his poetry, “My urban imagery was that of St. Louis.” This paper reads Eliot's The Waste Land in light of this comment, investigating the extent to which the construction of his hometown, St. Louis, in the nineteenth century, impinges upon the poem. The paper outlines the cultural conditions of St. Louis's construction as part of a settler colonial project, heavily influenced by certain narratives of quest and conquest. Throughout the construction of St. Louis, geographical and historical realities were continually replaced by an urban landscape which served to reflect these settler narratives. Using three separate case studies – the construction of the Eads Bridge, the destruction of the Cahokia mounds, and the St. Louis fire of 1849 – this paper makes the case that Eliot's characterization of urban space in The Waste Land as “unreal” is rooted in the construction of his hometown.

In the Beginning

This presentation highlights the nucleation of St. Louis’s ancient indigenous population into a place we refer to as Cahokia mounds. Important to its creation are not only understanding the nature of internal dynamics within the region but also the external relations between both places and other peoples. This allows us to address not only the broader context of Cahokia’s creation as an urban center and its subsequent urbanism but also the rapid nature of change throughout its history.

Stars

The stars have always fascinated poets and astronomers alike. Early Greek philosophers imagined a music of the spheres—a musica universalis—produced by the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, planets, and stars, said Pythagoras, all emit their own unique hum, an orbital resonance based on the mathematical harmony of their movements. Number, motion, harmonics, mystery: These are the rhetoric of the stars. Origen of Alexandria, the third-century Christian theologian, drew on Plato and others before him in contending that the stars were living beings, actively engaged in praising God and assisting human life. In the twelfth century, the Mississippian people at the Cahokia Mounds site near East St. Louis carefully studied the rising of the sun and stars at important times of the year. The Cahokians created a habitable cosmos by perceiving the stars as the living source of their cultural and religious life. They built more than a hundred mounds and five wood-henges in order to carefully measure solstices, equinoxes, and star risings. They monitored the ascent of celestial objects like Venus and the star cluster we know as the Pleiades. On the winter solstice, the author spends a cold, wet night atop Monk’s Mound, awaiting the rising of the Pleiades himself.