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By the time Eliot composed The Waste Land, he was exhausted by the hardships of life. In those days, nihilism and a sexual corruption were prevalent. Eliot regards this reality as a death-in-life condition, and thinks that the primary factor of it lies in the failure of love, the sexual disablement. Thus, he suggests.: that the recovery of real love should lead to the revival of the waste land, a new productive land. Eliot uses myths to show his idea most effectively. In The Waste Land the experience of the old waiter becomes relevant to a whole land, both the Fisher King myth and the modern reality. In The Waste Land Eliot follows the scheme suggested by, Jessie L Weston´s book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance. The most important idea for Eliot in Weston´s scheme is, that the Grail story subsumes a number of myths; this provided him both a central myth and a basic system of metaphor. In this scheme the experience of sex, like that of Phlebas, assumes a universal or religious significance; it is connected with the state of the land. For , the vegetation myths erect the cycle of the seasons into a series of divinely ordered events; and this cycle of life is based on sex and personified in ritualistic figures. To incorporate the individual into this scheme, it is necessary to parallel his experience with that of a figure in this ritual. Eliot identifies modern men who are spiritually dead with the Fisher King who is sterile. Eliot shows the agony and the ordeal´ that the questing knight, Tiresia, undergoes and makes us realize our sterility- and suffering in the circumstance like the waste land. Meanwhile, he suggests that the only `way of ´revival in the waste land´ should be the recovery of love, the origin of life.
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