T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" - The Most Influential Work in Modern Literature
T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is considered by many to be the most influential work in modern literature. First published in 1922, it captures the feelings and sentiments of modern culture after World War I. Line thirty of "The Waste Land," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," is often viewed as a symbol of mankind’s fear of death and resulting love of life. Eliot’s masterpiece—with its revolutionary ideas—inspired writers of his era, and it continues to affect writers even today.
In the first two lines of "The Waste Land," Eliot says, "April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land" (l. 1-2). Eliot shows the connection between death (emptiness) and life (fulfillment). Flowers and trees awaken and grow after the long, harsh winter months. The plants receive nutrients—and life—from the decayed remains of past vegetation. Yulisa Maddy’s No Past No Present No Future begins with the same ideas of new life beginning out of death. Joe Bengoh, after witnessing the fire that destroys his house, mumbles, "My parents dead?" (3). His callous words hardly conceal his true feelings of contempt for his parents. Joe’s suppressed jubilation is apparent in his next few thoughts. He thinks that, after the tragic death of his parents, Father O’Don will surely accept him at the mission house. In an attempt to make himself look troubled and distraught, Joe sticks his finger into his mouth and then rubs his eyes. Joe "kept on doing this until his eyes went red and felt as if he had been crying" (6). Joe ends up being accepted to the mission house, and he becomes inseparable from his new friends, Ade John and Santigie Bombolai. Joe’s new, positi...
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...ecognize these changes in his work.
The works of Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald follow Eliot’s, and America’s, ideas and trends. Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) also deals with World War I and the modern ideas toward sex. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) portrays the alcoholism and sexual promiscuity of the Jazz Age. In No Past No Present No Future, The "Brothers Three" use alcohol and drugs quite frequently, and they all tended to sleep around as well. The revolutionary ideas described in Eliot’s "The Waste Land" influenced many great writers in the past and continue to have an impact on authors today.
Works Consulted
Bible, The. New International Version. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1996.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998.
Maddy, Yulisa Amadu. No Past No Present No Future. Oxford: Heinemann, 1996.
Certain authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, wanted to reflect the horrors that the world had experienced not a decade ago. In 1914, one of the most destructive and pointless wars in history plagued the world: World War I. This war destroyed a whole generation of young men, something one would refer to as the “Lost Generation”. Modernism was a time that allowed the barbarity of the war to simmer down and eventually, disappear altogether. One such author that thrived in this period was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young poet and author who considered himself the best of his time. One could say that this self-absorption was what fueled his drive to be the most famous modernist the world had seen. As The New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean mentions in her literary summary of Fitzgerald’s works, “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty” (Orlean xi). One of the key factors that influenced and shaped Fitzgerald’s writing was World War I, with one of his most famous novels, This Side Of Paradise, being published directly after the war in 1920. Yet his most famous writing was the book, The Great Gatsby, a novel about striving to achieve the American dream, except finding out when succeeding that this dream was not a desire at all. Fitzgerald himself lived a life full of partying and traveling the world. According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, “In the 1920’s and 1930’s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity author whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920’s he stood for all-night partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure while in the 1930’s he stood for the gloomy aftermath of excess” (Baym 2124). A fur...
By the end of World War I, many American authors were ready to change their ways and views on writing. Authors are tired of tradition and limitations. One of these writers was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a participant in the wild parties with bootleg liquor, but he was also a critic of this time. His book, The Great Gatsby is an excellent example of modernist literature, through its use of implied themes and fragmented storyline.
Considered as the defining work of the 1920s, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published in 1925, when America was just coming out of one of the most violent wars in the nation’s history. World War 1 had taken the lives of many young people who fought and sacrificed for our country on another continent. The war left many families without fathers, sons, and husbands. The 1920s is an era filled with rich and dazzling history, where Americans experienced changes in lifestyle from music to rebellion against the United States government. Those that are born into that era grew up in a more carefree, extravagant environment that would affect their interactions with others as well as their attitudes about themselves and societal expectations. In this novel, symbols are used to represent the changing times and create a picture of this era for generations to come. The history, settings, characters, and symbols embedded in The Great Gatsby exemplify life in America during the 1920s.
In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, a novel set in The Roaring Twenties, portraying a flamboyant and immortal society of the ‘20s where the economy booms, and prohibition leads to organized crimes. Readers follow the journey about a young man named Jay Gatsby, an extravagant mysterious neighbor of the narrator, Nick Carraway. As the novel evolves, Nick narrates his discoveries of Gatsby’s past and his love for Daisy, Nick’s married cousin to readers. Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald develops the theme of the conflict which results from keeping secrets instead of telling the truth using the three characters – Tom Buchanan, Nick Carraway, and Jay Gatsby (James Gats).
Eliot, T. S., and Michael North. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.
In the aftermath of World War I, the 1920s twinkled on the horizon with the promise of hope. Bookended by the epidemic of 1920 and the The Wall Street crash of 1929, the decade was a time of decadence, frivolity, and escape. Rich or poor, people lived in the moment, loved anything new and the young partied like there was no tomorrow. A readers look into the decade can be found in the era's greatest memoir: The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald. F. Scott Fitzgerald applied the social and political issues of the 1920's and its innumerable characteristics to enhance the plot of The Great Gatsby.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby established himself as a great American author. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is classified as modernism and highlights life during the Jazz Age. A dominant theme of the novel is the quest for the “American Dream.” Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is somewhat autobiographical; emphasizes the literary elements of setting, theme, and symbolism; and has received extensive criticism.
Fellowship is a method of connection in Middlemarch. With imagination, fellowship can be viewed as positive because it helps characters develop hope. Right before the meeting between Dorothea and Lydgate, the narrator describes Dorothea as “she was full of confident hope about this interview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of his personal reserve; never heeding that she was a very young woman. Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship” (Eliot 761). In this passage, the narrator brings back the idea of Theresa in the prelude of the novel as he depicts Dorothea as someone who does not care about the rumors related to Lydgate nor her position as a young woman. Dorothea only cares about establishing a bond with Lydgate that would help clear his name in Middlemarch. It is the image of hope that helps Dorothea and Lydgate establish a fellowship that will give them the strength to resolve Lydgate’s problems. However, the narrator warns the readers that “we are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of illusion” (Eliot 324). The narrator brings out the negative side of fellowship and image by stating that desire comes from images and that fellowship can be ambiguous because it is associated with illusion. Since human are imaginative creatures and fellowship is empowered by images, the downside of fellowship is inevitable. Due to the ambiguity of fellowship and the illusions created by the imaginative minds; fellowship turns bonds between characters into bondages that chains...
The 1920’s were a time of social and technological change. After World War II, the Victorian values were disregarded, there was an increase in alcohol consumption, and the Modernist Era was brought about. The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a perfect presentation of the decaying morals of the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald uses the characters in the novel--specifically the Buchanans, Jordan Baker, and Gatsby’s partygoers--to represent the theme of the moral decay of society.
Eliot's Themes of Death and Futility in the Poem Remind Your Self of The Hollow Men
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
Eliot used these questions and fears in his poem, "The Waste Land." He displays the feelings of love for life as well as fear of death. Eliot writes of a "dead tree that can give no shelter," and a "dry stone no sound of water." Water symbolizes life and the dry stone implies the lack there of. The tree is dead and thus no shelter from the elements. Eliot continues, "There is shadow under this red rock,/ (Come in under the shadow of this red rock). Shadows imply darkness, death, and sinister dealings . Then Eliot writes, "And I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust." These are signs pointing to death. Eliot claims he will show you something different than the shadows you see in the morning and at night. The opposite of having a shadow would be not having a shadow, and if someone, other than Peter Pan, ceases to have a shadow then they obviously have ceased to have an earthly existence. The lack of water, a barren tree, the loss of shadows, and finally what I believe to be a Biblical allusion, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." There is mention in the Bible about originating from ashes and dust and returning to ashes and dust as well.
Under little scrutiny, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms seem to have common themes, but beyond the surface, the two books are radically different. The Great Gatsby is a tale about an ambitious man, Jay Gatsby, his old girlfriend Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom Buchanan. Gatsby, after returning from war, becomes a bootlegger during Prohibition in an attempt to win back Daisy who is ironically unhappily married to Tom Buchanan. In contrast, A Farewell to Arms has a much less glamorous plot which focuses on Frederick Henry. Henry faces many obstacles due to his involvement in World War I. As a result of his hardship, he desserts his role in the army and attempts to escape the country with Catherine, his pregnant girlfriend. Fitzgerald’s writing style is much more descriptive and creative as compared to Hemingway’s bland and terse nature. Even with the similarities between the themes of war and the reactions of the novel’s characters to it, the two books have diverse characters, plots, settings, and styles.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
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