Analysis of The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot Essay

Elliot’s “The Waste Land.” Each author highlights the meaning of rivers; Crane begins with the East River, which then grows into the Hudson and onto the Mississippi and Eliot with the River Thames. To each author the river has a distinct meaning. To Eliot, the River Thames is symbolic of the collapse of western civilization, which doesn’t factor into Crane’s piece. In “The Waste Land,” Eliot-like most British poets-immortalize the Thames. Despite how he depicts this, in the modern world it is just a dirty river. Eliot’s background causes him to symbolize the Thames differently than a reader would in the U.S. Similarly, a reader outside of the U.S. will symbolize the East, Hudson, and Mississippi Rivers completely different than Crane and other Americans. Foster believes that the connection in how one interprets a symbol, and their personal background goes hand in hand. Otherwise, everyone would connect the Thames to Eliot’s beliefs, or the Mississippi and Hudson according to Crane’s ideas. Rather Foster believes that it is important for a reader to have the freedom to interpret the text

Poetry can sometimes allow one to explore the unknown. However, in some works of poetry, one can realise that some known ideas or values remain relevant to current society. This is certainly applicable to T.S. Eliot’s poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Eliot’s manipulation of poetic techniques in both these poems allows the responder to realise that some ideas prevail in both modern and post-modern society. These poems explore the unknown phenomena of the obscurity regarding the purpose and meaning of life. This unknown phenomena causes the persona in both texts to resort to a sense of isolation or alienation. Eliot uses poetic techniques such as metaphors and personification to convey his ideas.

Eliot spoke about has been achieved by Amy Lowell magnificently. Therefore, she reached the Traditional sense as both the Historical and Traditional sense are the faces of the same coin. She knew that the past and the present are both connected by one web. It was apparent when she connected the chain of events in the poem to her advantage just to show this problem. The problem by living a life of “patterns” and being bound by society, which makes this poem not that original, because many people spoke about this problem before, but she herself as a talented writer, she added more to it. These “patterns” would represent us going into life with the same cycle over and over, almost like a daily routine, that each day takes a part away, till we all left empty-handed without any sort of feelings or

"How has your research into TS Eliot's life and the opinions of ONE critic enriched your understanding of an aspect of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock?"

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land explores modernism, specifically focusing on the troubling of binaries and the breakdown of the traditional. The boundaries between life and death, wet and dry, male and female, and more are called into question in Eliot’s conception of modernity and the waste land. The blurring of gender boundaries—significantly through Tiresias and the hooded figure scene in “What the Thunder Said”— in the poem lends itself to Eliot’s suggestion that traditional masculinity breaks down and decays in the waste land. Traditional masculinity is further challenged through Eliot’s criticism of hyper-masculinity and heterosexual relations in the modern era through allusions to the myth of Philomela and the “young man carbuncular” scene in “The Fire Sermon.” Along with this, Eliot stages scenes charged with homoeroticism to further challenge ideas of traditional masculinity. Homoerotic scenes such as the “hyacinth girl” scene in “The Burial of the Dead” and the Mr. Eugenides scene in “The Fire Sermon” suggest an intensity and enticement towards male-male relations, while also offering a different depiction of masculinity than is laid out in the heterosexual romance scenes. Through scenes depicting queer desire and homosexual behavior, Eliot suggests that masculinity in the modern era does not need to be marked by aggression and

Having support from his close friend, Ezra Pound, Eliot had became well known in the international movement of avant garde (poetryarchive.org). The next few years in Eliot’s growing success was also a time of rising family issues. His father, Henry Eliot, passed away in 1919. Eliot was facing a “paroxysm of guilt” and at the same time, Vivien’s health was declining. He then went through a nervous breakdown, and spent the next three months on a strict rest. It was during this time that Eliot finished writing a piece that he had began working on in 1919 but never finished (english.illinois.edu). Finally, he was able to publish The Waste Land in 1922. It was “considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century”

The Waste Land written by T.S. Eliot is said to be the most important poem of the 20th century. This poem is quite lengthy and composed of five sections that include many underlying themes, which is what makes the poem itself so significant. One of the topics that is mentioned most is the subject of women, and this is not done without purpose. A question left up to readers is whether or not this publicity is negative or positive. Although Eliot mentions women frequently, in The Waste Land, they are represented in an inferior manner, devaluing their worth.

The speaker of the poem in the unconsciousness reflecting on the past memories and present experiences in an individualistic, and philosophical approach, that is the style of "The Waste Land," of the dramatic monologue. The difference between "The Waste Land" and T.S. Eliot's earlier poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") is that the narrator of the poem is continuously changes the personages, countries, and the use of mythologies. This gives Eliot's poem a panoramic quality while also making it very fragmented. It's hard to keep track of who's saying what, but there's no doubt that for much of the poem, they're talking tous.

T.S. Eliot in the twentieth-century wrote what is today widely-regarded as one of the most important text of modernist poems, “The Waste Land.” This poem evaluates many aspects of ancient and contemporary culture and customs, and how the contemporary culture has degraded into a wasteland. In “The Waste Land,” Eliot conjures, through allusions to multiple religions and works of literature in five separate sections, a fragmented and seemingly disjointed poem. Eliot repeatedly alludes to western and eastern cultural foundation blocks to illustrate the cultural degradation prevalent in the modern era of England. One specific eastern example is brought up in the third section of the poem, which T.S. Eliot names “Fire Sermon,” an allusion to

The second section is titled, “A Game of Chess” in which Eliot explores the social world of the Wasteland. The wasteland is a place where its boring with empty barren land and Eliot plans on regenerating the land. This section begins with a scene from Thomas Middleton’s Elizabethan play, Women Beware Women. This scene transitions the poem from death to sex and represents the most modernism throughout the poem. This section also emphasizes on women drinking alcohol, abortions, and society. Before this time period, these topics were unspoken of.

T.S. Eliot is the greatest poet of the modernism era. Every piece of poetry he published was highly critiqued and at first not excepted. In the later days of his work as a poet he became more and more appreciated. It is very rare that the works of a poet will be so long lasting that they stay for such an extended period of time. The works by Eliot are often referred to as revolutionary. James Meredith, a biographer wrote about Eliot explaining, “Never compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry.” The Hollow Men written by T.S. Eliot it explains three different messages including the fact that everyone is empty and full at the same time, people no longer have religion, and people see the words but don’t appreciate the meaning.

As indicated by its title, “The Waste Land” offers the reader a desolate landscape of a world which is spiritually broken and corrupt, a reflection of the world in which many Modernist poets saw themselves in, with Eliot being no exception to this. The poem itself is consisted of five separate sections, each addressing different periods in time under a variety of different narrative voices. The poem as a whole is written largely as a dramatic monologue, with a constant shift between different narrative voices, though this can perhaps make the poem seem as more of an orchestral piece with these multiple identities. The alternating voices in “The Waste Land” are indeed quite individual to the poem itself and lend particularly well to it’s over all meaning. Each respective section in the poem also carries with it an underlying theme and message, all invariably being that of some kind of disillusionment or despair. Written in a world not long recovering from the destruction of the First World War, “The Waste Land” is indeed a reflection of the hardships faced by a civilization wrought with poverty, economic collapse and ever-increasing death rates. World War One was no doubt a true demonstration of a society’s full capacity to destroy both itself and others through means of war, and it indeed

While “The Waste Land” appears to be incoherently fragmented and lacking in any uniform structure, Eliot’s structural choices are not actually without significance; his astute selection of dynamic words stimulates genuine emotional responses within the reader. In section III, THE FIRE SERMON, Eliot describes an apathetic sexual encounter between a typist and a pimply young man, returning from World War I. Much of the poem does not follow a consistent rhyme scheme, but at this point, without any structural cues, the stanza slips into a Shakespearean sonnet (ll. 235-48); however, with a discordant sound, the final word fails to complete what should be a rhyming couplet:

T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a great example of a modernist work. Eliot implements

The people in The Waste Land do not seem to know how to kill time, as they have no concept of what meaningfulness is. Eliot might have viewed life without meaning as a never ending game, playing ourselves even when there will not be a winner. I claim that the lives of the people within this section are wasted by waiting for meaning to come to them, instead of