Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Other Poems: In Search of Traces of The Waste Land

At first glance, there does not seem to be any significant similarity between Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Other Poems (1972) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Lee’s fame was mainly established by his children’s books in Canada, and Eliot was a representative modernist poet, defending the validity of difficult poetry in the 20th century. Despite visible differences between the two writers, this paper searches for traces of The Waste Land in Civil Elegies and Other Poems, particularly in the title poem of Lee’s volume, by juxtaposing their beginnings and endings, and examining their ecological and social critiques set in the cities of Toronto and London, respectively. One may speculate that The Waste Land furnished a thematic precedent for Civil Elegies and Other Poems. The speaker of “Civil Elegies” bears witness to the oppressive pollution of the capital and the cultural colonization of Canada, and expresses the loss of civil agency and “the lament for a nation,” but ends with a prayer for the Earth hoping for a new life. Through a comparison of these two works published at the different times and places, this study attempts to explore the contemporary Canadian poet Dennis Lee, who inherits consciously or unconsciously Eliot’s legacy and manifests his own individual talent.