ABSTRACT
The ruins of old buildings instantiate the survival of a past remote enough to be imagined in many ways and shaping the Romantic idea of the picturesque as a lost pastoral world. Something like this could be said of the English Romantic poets, for instance, of Shelley's Ozymandias as a denunciation of power, except that Benjamin identifies ambivalence whereby allegory is destructive and creative. In contrast to Benjamin's politicised hope, Spengler proposes a de-politicised rationalisation of the perennial attraction of ruins as indicating civilisation's universal rise-and-fall: the ruin as a mirror of an underlying truth. Lehan reads The Waste Land as having, 'much in common with Spengler's city'. That is, as a narrative of decline. But why? The war produced the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon but the scale of slaughter was unrepresentable, as evident in Edwin Lutyens' design for The Cenotaph, a slab of stone devoid of figuration.
