ABSTRACT
Wagner, more than Frazer or Miss Weston, presides over the introduction into The Waste Land of the Grail motif. Eliot's emphasis on sexual malaise in The Waste Land has been evident to readers since the initial appearance of the poem, and his ambivalence toward feminine sexuality has been particularly noted by recent readers. The Waste Land presents us with a gallery of characters whose appearances succeed one another in serial fashion, seemingly unrelated by any obvious plot such as Wagner's operas provide. The famous seven-line monologue opening The Waste Land shows Eliot's mastery of the art of transition through poetic resources. Despite the many allusions, it is finally the sterility of the waste land itself that the protagonist finds intolerable in the face of his desperate need. The Waste Land is Eliot's only Wagnerian work-the only poem in which he employs leitmotiv and a full Wagnerian orchestra, as it were, for the sake of this sort of intensity.
