Influences in the Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

1488 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The influence of modernism in literature

The 1920’s are often referred to as the roaring twenties. It is customarily described as the golden age, boisterous and wild time period (Meredith 51). Contrary to this popular belief, authors, T.S Eliot, Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald described this time period differently. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land vividly describes the very state the world was found in after World War I. Eliot examines the way the land is left desolate, and the way the people act and live. Both the novels The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises exemplify the ideas and concepts Eliot describes. Characters in these works represent solipsism, ennui, lack of values and conditions found in The Waste Land. Ezra Pound wrote, “Pound's greatest service to Hemingway may well be directing him to Eliot's poetry just when The Waste Land made Eliot the dominant poet of Literary Modernism” (Flora 2012). Eliot’s writing greatly influenced many writers of his time period and there after. The beginning of The Waste Land begins by describing a scenery, “April is the cruellest month,” (Eliot 5) this exemplifies the season change and how it bares all of the imperfections that the snow shielded. Dead trees and unpleasant sights are exposed. This is true not only for physical surroundings, but also spiritually as well. People buried their thoughts and feelings much like the snow did the unpleasant landscape. People ignored the condition of their atmosphere and revealed no emotion or effort to change it. People can become so far removed from their environment making them indifferent to what goes on around them. Rather than working to put the shattered remnants back together, they retracted from society and their emotions instead. They bare no feelings, thoughts or p... ... middle of paper ... ...le but change is possible. The most important piece of the poem is that even in the darkest times you can emerge and move forward. At the end of The Sun Also Rises , Brett states that her and Jake would have had a good time with one another, Jake replies with, “ Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (Hemingway 251). This signifies that Jake has been able to grow and begin to encompass the values. Jake has demonstrated that people can evolve and that there is hope for all. At the end of The Great Gatsby a similar situation occurs. Nick comes to the conclusion that he can choose his destiny and he does not have to be like the careless people that surrounded him. The novel ends with,“ So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (Fitzgerald ). Each work is about a journey that leads to a common consensus, that there is still hope.

Show More
Related

  • The Traits of Jay Gatsby

    1167 Words  | 3 Pages

    One of the traits of Gatsby that makes him truly great is his remarkable capacity for hope. He has faith that what he desires will come to him if he works hard enough. He does not comprehend the cruelty and danger that is the rest of the world. Gatsby, while a man of questionable morals, is as wide-eyed and innocent as a small child in his views of the world. These ideals are evident in Nick’s narration and in the words spoken by the other characters, including Gatsby himself.

    Read More

  • Horrors of WWI Reflected in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Writing

    2584 Words  | 6 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Criticism In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

    1154 Words  | 3 Pages

    Quentin Hardy of the Huffington Post comments that “Much of American Literature is a consideration of our ability to head to the frontier, reinvent ourselves, make a shining city on a hill, be the last best hope for mankind, free ourselves of the shackles of the past, the tragic fate of birth in a particular place” (Hardy). The 1920’s was a time in which the everyday person could transform himself into anything he desired. Filled with promise, this period gave birth to what is known as “modernistic literature” where authors would unveil the true fragmentation of the modern world through inner revelation. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a key figure in this movement as his novel The Great Gatsby exposed human weakness in its ambition to dream of objects,

    Read More

  • T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – Can We Learn From the Past ?

    1758 Words  | 4 Pages

    When read for the first time, The Waste Land appears to be a concoction of sorts, a disjointed poem. Lines are written in different languages, narrators change, and the scenes seem disconnected, except for the repeated references to the desert and death. When read over again, however, the pieces become coherent. The Waste Land is categorized as a poem, but exhibited visually, it appears to be a literary collage. And when standing back and viewing the collage from afar, a common theme soon emerges. Eliot collects aspects from different cultures or what he calls cultural memories. These assembled memories depict a lifeless world, in which the barrenness of these scenes speak of a wasted condition. He concentrates on women, including examples of violence committed against them and the women's subsequent lack of response to this violence, to show how apathetic the world is. But The Waste Land is not a social commentary on the plight of women. Rather, the women's non-reaction to the violence against them becomes a metaphor for the impotence of the human race to respond to pain. Violence recurs throughout time, and as Eliot points to in his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" in the epigraph, we can break this cycle of violence and move ahead only by learning from the past and applying this knowledge to the present.

    Read More

  • Search for Innocence in American Modernism

    1581 Words  | 4 Pages

    Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1447-1463.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby: America in the 1920s

    2392 Words  | 5 Pages

    Wukovits, John F., ed. America's Decades: The 1920's. San Diego: Greehaven Press Inc., 2000. Print.

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Their Eyes Were Watching God And The Great Gatsby

    1159 Words  | 3 Pages

    There are several other places and occurrences in these novels that show how much people unknowingly care for eachother and desire to socialize with one another. Although T.S. Eliot believed that modern society in the 1920’s lacked a vital sense of community and a spiritual center, character interactions, events, and places in Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Great Gatsby prove otherwise.

    Read More

  • The Influence Of Money In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

    1511 Words  | 4 Pages

    The 1920’s were a time of economic indulgences. The stock market was in a period of wild growth and Americans were enjoying their newfound prosperity. America just came off a triumphant success in the First World War and the 1920’s and was the outlandish victory party. The New York Times said, “Gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession” of the 1920’s. The morality which the common citizen had previously upheld became corrupted, and the American Dream, which once meant making a living through integrity and hard work, became tainted, emphasizing the quick, not necessarily honest, acquisition of money and wasteful spending. The life, desires, and ultimate failure of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald deprecates

    Read More

  • America and the Decay of Morality: The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises Introduction

    2099 Words  | 5 Pages

    The American Dream and the decay of American values has been one of the most popular topics in American fiction in the 20th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises create a full picture of American failure and pursue its ideals after the end of World War I by portraying the main characters as outsiders and describing the transportation in a symbolic way. Putting the aimless journeys for material life foreground, Fitzgerald and Hemingway skillfully link West and men and associate East to not only money but women. As American modernists, Hemingway utilizes his simple and dialog-oriented writing to appeal to readers and Fitzgerald ambiguously portrays Gatsby through a narrator, Nick, to cynically describe American virtue and corruption, which substantially contribute to modernism in literature.

    Read More

  • William Williams' Spring and All

    2005 Words  | 5 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Waste Land

    2548 Words  | 6 Pages

    T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” offers an interpretation of the modern world that on one hand underscores the disillusionment of the future in a world that is fragmented and bare, and on the other hand, presents a case for recognizing freedom and meaning in the “heap of broken images” that make up the modern climate. The opening segment “The Burial of the Dead” looks toward a future that is composed of fragments and paradox. The fragments in the waste land that is presented are that of memory. More specifically, the fragments represent a failure in the human condition to connect memories of the past to those of the present in a way that is hopeful and inspiring. Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley present this concept in Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Here they describe a waste land in which “She [Marie] perceives the dualistic and paradoxical present as cruel because, in remembering the past and intuiting the future, sh...

    Read More

  • The Power of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

    1515 Words  | 4 Pages

    with the Jamesian note, "I read, much of the night, and go south in the

    Read More

  • The Wasteland and The Matrix

    1484 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...to subjects relevant to today, such as religion.Eliot argues that without religion we are all lack direction and more importantly we lack substance in our lives. Without religion, we are superficial and it is due to this that we turn to pop culture. Pop culture is a filler for that which is intellectually rewarding. Eliot recognized this and for this reason he wrote “The Wasteland”. Eliot’s poem made bold statements about what was really happening in the modern world. Whether one argue with Eliot’s positions or not, his work joins the canon of the classic and ironically provides an opportunity for readers to plug into something greater.

    Read More

  • Waste Land Essay: Ceremonies and Rituals

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    Ceremonies are prevalent throughout T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Eliot relies on literary contrasts to illustrate the specific values of meaningful, effectual rituals of primitive society in contrast to the meaningless, broken, sham rituals of the modern day.  These contrasts serve to show how ceremonies can become broken when they are missing vital components, or they are overloaded with too many.  Even the way language is used in the poem furthers the point of ceremonies, both broken and not. In section V of The Waste Land, Eliot writes,

    Read More

  • T.S. Eliot’s Powerful Use of Fragmentation in The Waste Land

    2713 Words  | 6 Pages

    On the most superficial level, the verbal fragments in The Waste Land emphasize the fragmented condition of the world the poem describes. Partly because it was written in the aftermath of World War I, at a time when Europeans’ sense of security as well as the land itself was in shambles, the poem conveys a sense of disillusionment, confusion, and even despair. The poem’s disjointed structure expresses these emotions better than the rigidity and clarity of more orthodox writing. This is evinced by the following from the section "The Burial of the Dead":

    Read More

More about Influences in the Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

Open Document