Literary Analysis of “The Waste Land”
When T.S Eliot wrote “The Waste Land”, just four years after World War 1, he was deeply troubled by the true nature of the people around him. People seemed too willing to abandon their cultures and submit to a rule of the mob. This coupled with the nearly nine million causalities of the war caused Eliot and many other artists to rethink their ideas of art and literature. In the resulting influx of experimental styles in art, T.S Eliot created “The Waste Land” to express his disgust with the modern sea of stupid, violent, and worst of all, average people ("T.S. Eliot Biography."). In the first section of the “The Waste Land,” T.S Eliot’s use of inconstant narration and setting, fragments of foreign languages,
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hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” Eliot uses this to tell the reader that he or she and everyone else who takes part in society is responsible for the horrid state of the world (Davidson). His use of a foreign language in this instance deceives the reader and postpones the moment that the reader discovers that he or she is being accused, paralleling the deceptive nature of society itself.
Finally, In “The Burial of the Dead”, Eliot combines enjambment (the act of ending the lines of a poem with words that end in -ing) and a perfect iambic pentameter in order to make each line of the poem sound incomplete even though it is technically complete. This can easily be seen in the following line (Shmoop Editorial Team). April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (The Waste Land, line 1-4)
Eliot’s use of iambic pentameter introduces the reader to a familiar and structured construct much like what society initially seems to be but when the reader continues to delve into either the poem or society, he or she discovers that they are both intrinsically alienating (Shmoop Editorial
Filmed for nearly three years, Waste Land follows famed artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest landfill, Jardim Gramacho, situated on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eccentric band of catadores, otherwise known as garbage pickers. The catadores are a definitive marginalized populace; jobless in any conventional sense, they turn to picking profitable recyclable materials from the junk discarded by those in Brazil luckier than themselves. Depicted in the documentary is a culture unlike any other that I have ever seen. The people within this isolated culture live in the most horrifying conditions imaginable. They are isolated from society along with the essence of life itself; their homes and lives revolve around a place filled with garbage, trash, and discarded and unwanted items. Therefore, it is impossible to fathom how the people that dwell here don't feel as
The most obvious stylistic device used by Eliot is that of personification. She uses this device to create two people from her thoughts on old and new leisure. The fist person is New Leisure, who we can infer to be part of the growth of industry in the 19th century. He is eager and interested in science, politics, and philosophy. He reads exciting novels and leads a hurried life, attempting to do many things at once. Such characteristics help us to create an image of New Leisure as Eliot sees him.
From above, the world of the Jardim Gramacho landfill appears to be nothing more than garbage with the catadores (pickers)—as small and as insignificant as ants—sorting through the rubbish. The workers collect and sell recyclable items in hazardous conditions, earning around USD $20 per day. Yet in Lucy Walker’s “Waste Land,” the garbage of Rio de Janeiro is transformed into fine art as Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, seeks to humanize the marginalized catadores of Brazilian society. The film focuses on the people Muniz encounters and ultimately photographs for his collection of portraits, entitled “Pictures of Garbage.” The documentary follows the life of the catadores as they collaborate with Muniz on stunning pieces of modern art made from
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.
During T. S. Eliot’s time many of his contemporaries including himself were in the custom of alluding to classic works of poetry. They incorporated references to notable texts like Dante. Eliot especially is a main perpetrator of alluding. Eliot has the ability create a picture for the reader and provide historical context to his works. A contemporary of Eliot, Pound, once said you should try to “be influenced by as many great artists as [they] can” (Pound 95). Eliot is following what Pound said by incorporating allusions in his works.
Different speakers in "The Waste Land" mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20th-century life -- various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind -- have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this time period is forced to shore these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.
There are a number of these images in the works. Many of Picasso's are fairly evident the burning man in the right corner for example or the severed head on the bottom. These show the devastation of the world, as we know it. Eliot has recurring images not unlike these in The Waste Land. Eliot continually refers to the unnatural lack of water in the wasteland or the meaningless broken sex in the society of his day.
The work forced and challenged the reader to engage in classical literary works (i.e. Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Dante’s Inferno as well as multiple languages to be able to decipher and conceptualize the ideas that Eliot was trying to express. However, by drawing upon classical literary works and alternative languages, it could be argued the themes used placed the poem among the educated elite of society and excluded the under-educated working class, using language as a method to exclude certain groups. In spite of that, Eliot’s innovative approach to form and theme within the historical period of modernity (as defined above), led to The Waste Land being recognized as a key piece of modernist literature. Modernist art (including poetry) helped to reflect the socio-political climate, which was a time of rapid industrialization: the development of the steam engine, electricity, the automobile, and the development of synthetic material (Bullock, 1971, 58). These major industrial changes and their social impact forced a shift in political attitudes from the old ideologies of the bourgeois status based on land ownership, to bourgeois status based on those who owned the means of production (i.e.... ...
In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.
Q5 "Much of what Eliot writes about is harsh and bleak, but he writes about it in a way that is often beautiful". Comment fully on both parts of this assertion.
In The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot offers a wonderful insight to the spiritual aspect of the modern world. The wasteland that is described in the poem consists of a dried up and waterless land. Throughout the poem, Eliot looks for us to find a solution on how to rescue ourselves from what is known as the wasteland. To come to the full solution, he asks that we must give ourselves in the way of sacrifice. Another way to look at sacrifice is in Christianity, it has a tie into the theme of love. In order to come to this solution, it is very important to look deeper into the meaning of the poem and the way it is related to religion. Through doing this, it is important that one looks at the symbolism that lies deep within the poem, and analyzes what it really means to the reader in a spiritual form. The spiritual symbol that most lead us to the solution of rescuing oneself from the wasteland is water and its influence in the theme of love in the poem.
The poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T.S. Eliot creates a sense of emptiness by showing the moral failings of society and the loss of memory that is present throughout the world. Eliot creates this sense of a lack of morals by showing the thieving child who does not hesitate to reach out and steal a toy running along the pier, pocketing it without any reaction. Then Eliot mentioned that he could see nothing behind the child’s eye.” With this quote, Eliot uses a metaphor to create a sense of emptiness and lack of morality within the child, which is backed up by the lack of hesitation in the child’s actions. Eliot uses this to creates the sense that society does what it wants and to and does not consider others when doing so.
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.
...required a reinvention of poetics and the very use and meaning of language. Since the modern period is said to extend to this day (it's debated whether it's post-modern or not, since both elements survive), any final say on the matter is difficult. What can be said is that Eliot's poetry, as misinterpreted, misread, and misunderstood as it may be, is a quintessential cornerstone in modernist thought, a fragment in the puzzle, which may yield an emergent whole, though it may not be fully grasped.
This poem is considered to be “one of the most difficult poems in a difficult literary period”. The Wasteland is a poem that is said to be one of his most influential works. At first glance, critics considered the poem to be too modern, but then opinions changed as they realized the poem reflected Eliot’s disillusionment with the moral decay of World War I in Europe. T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland combines theme, style, and symbolism to explore life and death. The Wasteland was written in 1922 and is a long poem divided into five sections.