Spiritual Decay in The Waste Land
In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot develops his theme of sterility and decay in the post-World War I man by focusing on the aspect of "religious dearth or superficiality reflected in despintualized love" (Pinion). For Eliot, man's inability to find real love or to move beyond superficial sexual gratification is congruous to the spiritual decay of his soul.
In the first part of the poem, "The Burial of the Dead'~ Eliot's allusions to two love stories amidst a backdrop of "stony rubbish" and "broken images" illustrates his view of love as something that has lost its ability to blossom in the infertility of modem society (20,22). Eliot alludes to the story of Tristan, a young sailor, who leaves his lover, Isolde, behind when he sails for home. As he lies dying, he waits for the arrival of her ship, but the sea that is to bring her remains empty and desolate. This shows how human longing in love is fr...
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...erating his hope for the regeneration or rebirth of the human spirit (424-425).
Works Cited and Consulted
Pinion, F.B., A T.S. Eliot Companion: Life and Works, The Macmillan Press (1986)
Southam, B.C., A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Harcourt Brace & Company
Shashane, VA "Reflections on the Waste Land", Studies on IS Eliot Ed. A.N. Dwivedi; US Bahri Publishers (1989)
Raffel, Burton IS Eliot Frederick Ungar Publising Co., Inc. (1982)
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.
Southam, B.C. A Student's Guide to The Selected Poem of T.S. Eliot. 1963: Boston, Faber and Faber Limited. 1990
In adopting fertility symbolism, Eliot was probably influenced by Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps. The summer before writing The Waste Land he saw the London production, and on reviewing it in September he criticized the disparity between Massine's choreography and the music. He might almost have been sketching his own plans for a work applying a primitive idea to contemporary life:
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.
"Cascando," by S. Beckett (Poems 41-42), and "Burnt Norton," by T. S. Eliot (Quartets 7-13) express the poets' desire for love and union: Beckett, desiring a woman, expresses his apprehension of their love, and Eliot, wanting divine revelation, expresses his apprehension of God's love in creating the universe. Knowing the poets' personal circumstances, the artists' creative suffering can be discovered in these complex poems, as they struggle to discern the uncertain future, and to arrange to procure their desires. Beckett is "terrified again of not loving." Without love, for Eliot the "cause and end of movement," "sad time stretching before and after" is wasted. Can they obtain love? Or, is love unobtainable? Does the essence of time and mankind's free will preclude love? In answering these questions, the poems' creators' convey their philosophical beliefs about love, time, and free will, with the use of figurative language, diction, syntax, and particularly with repeated words and phrases, line and sound patterning. These poetic techniques interact with the meanings and associations of the poems' words, phrases, lines, and stanzas to contribute to our pleasure and understanding.
"T.S. Eliot: Childhood & Young Scholar." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 30 Jan. 2014.
...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
The early poetry of T. S. Eliot, poems such as "The Wasteland" or "The Love Song
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.
This imagery compares to T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” where we are given an even deeper look into the emptiness of the modern world. The loneliness of the city could reflect Prufrock’s feelings of not having a woman and his unwillingness to act on his
Eliot contrasts the past with the present in several ways throughout his poem, The Waste Land. The simplest of these is the simple juxtaposition of one or more descriptions of the present immediately before or after one or more descriptions of the past. The most obvious of these is section two, in which two descriptions of the present (lines 111-139 and 140-172) immediately follow a description of the past (lines 77-110). In this case, the juxtaposition is used to hold the modern attitude toward sex and love next to an attitude from the past. In the first part of section two, the description opens with a reference to the description of Antony and Cleopatra's first meeting in Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra, and Eliot's footnote explicitly refers the reader to that passage. The love and passion of Antony and Cleopatra was an event that changed the future of the Roman Empire and, through that, influenced the direction of the Western world. This passage is rich and seductive in detail, controlled in tone, and cohesive in structure.
Southam, B.C. A guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994.
Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot; a Poem by Poem Analysis. New York:
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.
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.