ABSTRACT
Much of Eliot's poetry, and The Waste Land conspicuously, enacts a sense of displacement that remained with him always. In The Waste Land the sense of displacement has a wide historical and geographical context. Eliot's habitual way of keeping himself apart while appearing to belong, of being both alien and resident, is demonstrated by his wary association with the Bloomsbury Group at the time of The Waste Land. One of Eliot's poetic procedures for distancing himself from his emotions is his extensive and habitual art of allusion, by which personal experience can be seen from the perspective of other poets, other times. When in The Waste Land Eliot quotes the last line of Baudelaire's 'Au Lecteur', 'You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, - mon frere!', he implicates reader and poet in a conspiracy of self-conscious literariness that both confines and liberates.
