A wasteland [weyst-land] is defined as: land that is uncultivated or barren; an area that is devastated as by flood, storm, or war; something as a period of history, phase of existence, or locality that is spiritually, or intellectually barren; one of the most important poems of the twentieth century (Dictionary.com). The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, has puzzled its audience and been tossed aside by the general population since 1922, when the poem was published. To a reader not committed to delving into its metaphors, the story might appear to represent the broken faithlessness of a society physically and emotionally marred after the Great War. However, Eliot intended the meaning to be much deeper. He strived to capture the struggle of awareness and ambivalence between moral grandeur and mortal evil (Britannica 2). The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, provides an eulogy for an intellectual society murdered by the Jazz Age through the multi-metaphorical symbols of the epigraph, “The Burial of the Dead,” “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” and “What the Thunder Said.”
The poem begins with an epigraph of “Satyricon,” in ancient Greek and Latin. That story is of Cumaean Sibyl, Apollo’s prophetess, wishing for immorality. She is granted this, however, it is immortality without eternal youth. Therefore, she miserably and painfully grows older forever, never dying (Arbiter 7). The quote translates into:
I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a cage, and when the boys cried at her, “Sybil, what do you want?” she responded, “I wish I were dead.” (Eliot 99)
This seems like a pessimistic excerpt to precede a story that is comprehensively equally angst. The connection Eliot saw between this piece of “Satyricon” a...
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...ersity. Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 20. Nov. 2013. Thank God for Shmoop. This is the best, most descriptive, in debt source on the internet for this subject.
Spark Notes Editorial Team. “Spark Notes: Eliot’s Poetry: Themes, Motifs, & Symbols.” SparkNotes. SparkNotes, n.d. Web 05 Dec. 2013. This was a necessary, but undesired source. It filled in some gaps in my paper with useful information.
“The Waste Land.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013. This source was insightful. The text was very plain and boring. Also I do not appreciate how they conjoin their vowels.
“Wasteland.” Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, 20 Nov. 2013. Knowing the definition of key words fully is always important in understanding and analyzing literature. Dictionary.com is never a disappointment.
...hoices, Eliot shows the opposite outcome of depression and regret from a lifetime of indecision. Whether it is a far-away land of fantastical beings, the woods down the street, or perhaps the nearest city, a journey will always yield a different experience, and indecision is just as much a decision as any other. Choosing to remain inactive in a world that calls for action is to choose to grow old and have nothing of substance to look back on, since nothing was ever done.
Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” (Goebbels). Joseph Goebbels along with the Communist Party used this to describe their propaganda scheme to draw a whole nation into their control. This action shows a lapse of responsibility and the ability to escape a problem. Like Goebbels, the characters of The Sun Also Rises and The Hollow Men use excuses to get away from the problem. The characters in The Sun Also Rises are also considered Hollow Men as the group continually refuses to care or make a choice because the characters constantly turn to escapism to forget their problems, seemingly cope with changes in their lives but fail to do so, and regularly flashback to the past show a focus on a life already lived.
...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.
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.
...e state of waste is not perpetual, we can find strength and hope for a better future. The ability to convey these messages with such strength along with the ability to powerfully effect his audience and have a tangible effect on the world is what sets T. S. Eliot and The Wasteland apart, and truly gives his poetry the power to change the world.
Mortal loss was more than just a threat at the time T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste
Eliot, T. S., and Christopher Ricks. The Waste Land. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997. Print.
In the first section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot offers a criticism of London, a center of modern life, and its people. He describes London as an “Unreal City” which suffers “[u]nder the brown fog of a winter dawn” (7), which suggests that London is dirty, cold, and uninviting. The people, too, are unhappy and discontent, as many sigh frequently and keep their eyes “fixed” on their feet (7). That each person is focused on his own space suggests that each person is isolated, despite being surrounded by a crowd. Eliot also writes of the crowd, “I had not thought death had undone so many…There I saw one I knew, and stopped him” (7); these references to Dante’s journey through hell in the Inferno link the people in the crowd to the dead and London to hell. The imagery and wording that Eliot uses present the reader with the overwhelming sense that London is a place of depressing and dirty isolation.
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.
Death is the primary theme in TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. Written just four years after the conclusion of World War I, The Wasteland mirrors the despair felt by much of the post-war generation. The poem begins with a section titled "Burial of the Dead." In this section Eliot deems April "the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain." With these lines, Eliot suggests that springtime’s regeneration of life only causes people to remember what was lost in the past. Eliot again addresses death in the very next stanza:
with the Jamesian note, "I read, much of the night, and go south in the
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.
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.
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.
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,