Mirrors and Lamps of The Waste Land: The Representational Dilemma and Perspectivism’s Redemption in T.S. Eliot’s Poetics

Abstract

This article takes the language crisis in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a starting point to explore the profound impact of the 20th-century linguistic turn in philosophy on poetic creation and interpretation. It systematically traces the theoretical evolution from representationalism to expressionism, culminating in perspectivism. The representationalism of analytic philosophy, viewing language as a mirror of the world, excluded poetic and other non-referential discourse. Conversely, the expressionism of continental philosophy saw poetry as a lamp disclosing existence, emphasizing its truth-revealing function, yet it often fell back into metaphysical traps. The article proposes that a perspectivist poetics emerges at the intersection of Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s thought. This approach contends that poetry does not reflect or reveal a transcendental truth but constructs meaning through specific perspectives. Readers participate in the poetic language-game via the mechanism of “seeing-as”, co-generating poetic truth through multiple interpretations. The Waste Land, with its fragmented structure, polyphonic voices, and intertextual collage, perfectly embodies this perspectivist poetics—it rejects a single interpretation, inviting readers to experience the complex landscape of the modern waste land through shifts in perspective, making the poem itself a philosophical practice for training perception and reshaping worldviews.