The Wasteland

1737 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How does the character of tiresias function dramatically in oedipus rex

T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” depicts a definitive landscape of desolation, reflecting the damaged psyche of humanity after World War I. Relationships between men and women have been reduced to meaningless social rituals, in which sex has replaced love and physical interaction has replaced genuine emotional connection. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” goes a step further in depicting these relationships: the speaker reveals a deep sexual frustration along with an awareness of morality, in which he is conscious of his inability to develop a connection with women yet cannot break free from his silence to ask “an overwhelming question” (line 10). “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” together illustrate that individuals are in conflict with meaningless social rituals in modern society. This raises some interesting questions: why is there such an intense lack of connection between men and women? Can it ever be mended? In comparing the relationships between these two poems, we discover that...

The modern world as depicted by Eliot in “The Wasteland” is one with arbitrary male-female interaction loaded with meaningless sex and casual one-night stands. One such relationship--that of the typist and the clerk--not only shows a lack of connection between the two but also a lack of understanding of each other. The clerk’s actions in the sentences, “The time is now propitious, as he guesses, / The meal has ended, she is bored and tired, / Endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still are unreproved, if undesired” (235-239) and “Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference” (240-242) shows the absence of verbal communication that is commonplac...

... middle of paper ...

...o find meaning in their lives or a point in creating meaningful relationships with the opposite sex. After subjecting themselves to meaningless social rituals which override personal human connection, they are reduced to a spiritual emptiness in which they are unable to overcome their vices. Tiresias is the one character who understands. His suffering has led him to understand that their current state of waste is not perpetual. Though all men and women cannot be subjected to the same experiences Tiresias suffered through, there is a solution. If they can understand that the current state of being was different in the past and will be different in the future, that their state of desolation and waste is transient, their desire to form meaningful relationships can be restored, their ability to love can be revitalized, and they can all find a meaningful purpose to life.

Show More
Related

  • Comparison: Marriage, by Gregory Corso & The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T. S. Eliot

    2128 Words  | 5 Pages

    Corso spent much of his early life between foster parents and prison, the latter being where he was introduced to poetry. Now credited as a key member of the “Beat Generation”, a group of poets who were opposed to social conformity and the traditional forms of poetry, Corso typically wrote poetry “on serious philosophical issues” (Olson 53). On the other hand, Eliot’s upbringing was more traditional, where he attended Harvard and went on to become a figure of immense influence in the literary world. Eliot’s first major poetic publication, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, bears many resemblances to Corso’s postmodern poem Marriage, a poem written to criticize the philosophical issues associated with marriage. To begin with, Corso’s Marriage opens with two rhetorical questions that the speaker attempts to answer throughout the course of the poem.

    Read More

  • The Pitiful Prufrock of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    1314 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.

    Read More

  • T.S. Elliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    1115 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” tells the speaker’s story through several literary devices, allowing the reader to analyze the poem through symbolism, character qualities, and allusions that the work displays. In this way, the reader clearly sees the hopelessness and apathy that the speaker has towards his future. John Steven Childs sums it up well in saying Prufrock’s “chronic indecision blocks him from some important action” (Childs). Each literary device- symbolism, character, and allusion- supports this description. Ultimately, the premise of the poem is Prufrock second guessing himself to no end over talking to a woman, but this issue represents all forms of insecurity and inactivity.

    Read More

  • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as the Embodiment of the Modern Conscience

    1005 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the early 1900’s, the artistic movement of modernism dominated many facets of aesthetic representation as writers, artists, and musicians abandoned the starched, conventional styles of the Victorian age for a less restrictive form of expression. Artisans, particularly the writers of the period, experimented within their craft by ignoring the traditional narrative and poetic forms in an attempt convey their personal disdain for the social climate of a newly industrialized culture consumed with monetary wealth and the ideals of genteel refinement that attended to its standards. This contempt for the conventional values of society became a prevailing theme of modern American literature, as writers like T.S. Eliot turned the focus of their works away from the portrayal and praise of upper and middle class society and toward their personal critique of this mode of life. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," embodies this popular modern theme by directing the reader's attention toward how an individual is subconsciously affected by the standards of society by focusing on the self and how social ethics can drive feelings of inadequacy and alienation.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Love Song Of Prufrock

    1044 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but

    Read More

  • The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    1253 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an ironic depiction of a man’s inability to take decisive action in a modern society that is void of meaningful human connection. The poem reinforces its central idea through the techniques of fragmentation, and through the use of Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world. Using a series of natural images, Eliot uses fragmentation to show Prufrock’s inability to act, as well as his fear of society. Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world is also evident throughout. At no point in the poem did Prufrock confess his love, even though it is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but through this poem, T.S. Eliot voices his social commentary about the world that Prufrock lives in.

    Read More

  • Waste Land Essay: Eliot's Use of Different Speakers

    688 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Second Coming a Poem by W.B. Yeats

    1871 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...s, Colleen. The love song of T.S. Eliot: elegiac homoeroticism in the early poetry. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot. Ed. Cassandra Laity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. p. 20

    Read More

  • Message of Hope in Eliot's The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    2421 Words  | 5 Pages

    Message of Hope in Eliot's The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    Read More

  • Psychoanalytic Criticism In The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

    881 Words  | 2 Pages

    T.S. Eliot is often considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th Century. Not only were his highly regarded poems such as “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” influential to the literary style of his time, but his work as a publisher highlighted the work of many talented poets. Analyzing his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with psychoanalytic criticism reveals several core issues in the speaker of the poem, and may reflect Eliot himself.

    Read More

  • The Inward Turn of Modernist Literature

    1707 Words  | 4 Pages

    One of T.S. Eliot’s earliest poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is a prime example of a text that takes a turn inwards in terms of conveying the experience it presents. The poem provides a look into the distressed mind of an archetypal modern man of the times. It does this using the speaker’s stream of consciousness presented as a dramatic monologue. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seeks to advance his relationship with a woman who has caught his eye. He wonders if he has “the strength to force the moment to its crisis” (Eliot, 80). Prufrock is so entrenched in self-doubt that he is uncertain whether he is capable of having a relationship with this woman. His knowledge of the world he lives in and his circumstances keep him from attempting to approach this prospective lover. He contemplates the reasons for which he believes he cannot be with her and scolds himself for even thinking that it was possibl...

    Read More

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

    2713 Words  | 6 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Waste Land: Allusions

    1328 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, is written in the mood of society after World War I. By using these allusions, The Waste Land reflects on mythical, historical, and literary events. The poem displays the deep disillusionment felt during this time period. In the after math of the great war, in an industrialized society that lacks the traditional structure of authority and belief, in the soil that may not be conductive to new growth (Lewis). Eliot used various allusions that connected to the time period and the effect of the war on society in his poem. Aided by Eliot’s own notes and comments, scholars have been able to identify allusions to: the Book of Common Prayer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles-Louis Philippe, James Thomas, Guillaume Appollinaire, Countess Marie Larsich, Wyndham Lewis, nine books of the Bible, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Wagner, Sappho, Catullus, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, J.G. Frazer, Jessie L. Weston, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelair, Dente, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and John Webster—all within the first section of 72 lines, about one allusion every two lines (Lewis). Using various allusions, Eliot was able to connect to the fact that he lived in a modern day waste land as a result of the destruction caused by World War I. Eliot used the allusions to show that death brings new beginnings and change, and love still flourishes.

    Read More

  • Wasteland Motherhood

    1581 Words  | 4 Pages

    Motherhood is at times an extremely complicated process that a multitude of mothers go through when taking on the choice to raise a child. Based on the individual, this process can be one that is natural or extremely difficult to execute. Within this process, there are new issues and mindsets that emerge in the threshold of motherhood that creates intense struggles. In the texts Waste Land (Walker, 2010) by Lucy Walker and “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath the director and poet display these issues and struggles within these two different mediums that eventually arise in the never-ending process. These texts connect to one another by demonstrating and including the struggles of urges to provide, emotions of detachment, and improving mindsets

    Read More

  • T.S. Eliots use of Poetic techniques in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland

    1309 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S Eliot, widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern poetry, has written many great poems. Among the most well known of these are “The Waste Land, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which share similar messages, but are also quite different. In both poems, Eliot uses various poetic techniques to convey themes of repression, alienation, and a general breakdown in western society. Some of the best techniques to examine are ones such as theme, structure, imagery and language, which all figure prominently in his poetry. These techniques in particular are used by Eliot to both enhance and support the purpose of his poems.

    Read More

More about The Wasteland

Open Document