The Past In Hurston's The Waste Land

study of great works of the past, claiming it, "cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour." Eliot asserts that it is absolutely necessary for the poet to learn past traditions, to have an understanding of the poets that preceded them, and to be well versed enough that they can understand and incorporate the so-called "mind of Europe" into their poetry. It stands to reason, then, that if a poet must be a master of literary tradition past and present to create a great work of art, his reader must be at the very least somewhat familiar with the referenced traditions to understand it.
For Eliot, believing as he did that great works were focused experimentations using an informed knowledge of your predecessors, …show more content…
Hurston uses mythological framework to create her modern American folklore, much in the same way Eliot used allusion and imagery to create the necessarily chaotic universal journey. Readers of Hurston’s work would benefit greatly from a working knowledge of the past in the same way that an anthropologist benefits from understanding history – we can inform our perception of the present by taking cues from the past. It is for this reason that – while perhaps not as strongly felt in Hurston’s work as compared to Eliot’s – it is still imperative that the reader become a student of literary history in some form to grasp the complete nuance of the work. It is obvious that Hurston wrote this novel near the end of the modernist era, when the pressure to blaze a trail into a new realm of literature was less noticeable. Her novel has elements that could readily appeal to the lay reader, including a protagonist and plot which are generally comprehensible. But still, she looks back to the past for inspiration – as Eliot says all great writers must – and we must look with her. While modernism may not, after all, be the most accessible tradition of literature by the standards of most casual readers (and may be called elitist because of this) it is one that, for all of its emphasis on art over consumption, places the greatest faith in the reader to be willing to dig - as an anthropologist does - to find echoes of meaning in the past or in chaos and come to our own, free conclusions. It is for that reason that I say the modernist works have the capacity be accessible, especially in our golden age of information, if we are only willing to take the time to explore