T.S. Eliot the Wasteland Essay

Over the course of the next several days, you will complete a writing assignment. In the assignment, you will demonstrate your understanding of the tenets of modernist literature by rewriting a Romantic poem in a way that incorporates typically modernist qualities in terms of language, style, literary elements, and themes. The assignment is broken down into four parts.

Simile-“Sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water” (4). This quote makes me think of the main character losing control. In this quote, the water is used in a simile to represent how she feels like she's just letting her opportunities slip through her fingers and she feels like there isn't anything she can do to stop it from happening because much like water you have no way of keeping it in your hands. Diction-“At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for funeral” (11).

For years, post-modern writers have foreshadowed what the end of the world would look like through dramatic representations in literary works. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx & Crake, are no exception to this. Delving into the complexities that underlie man’s existence on Earth, these authors use their novels as vehicles to depict a post-apocalyptic world, in which all that once was is reduced to an inconceivable wasteland, both figuratively and literally.

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

The poetry of T.S Elliot portrays the nature of human conditions through the use of experiences such as alienation and how this leads to spiritual vacancy and paralysis which allow his poems to retain an enduring value. In Both the ‘The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ (Prufrock, 1915) and Prelude (1917), poetic language convey the loneliness of humankind in a physical and moral way. Through a study of Eliot’s poetic forms, features and critical reception, we can better understand the message portrayed.

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

Cooperation is the key to human survival, and over time humans have been known to group together to survive. This strategy has allowed humans to develop massive cities and countries of immense power. Without the natural instinct to cling to one another, humans would not be as advanced as they are today, and may not have even made it out of the caves. Many authors display our natural instinct to cooperate in their works, allowing the characters to become more real to the readers.

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

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

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 this discussion of Eliot’s poem I will examine the content through the optic of eco-poetics. Eco- poetics is a literary theory which favours the rhizomatic over the arborescent approach to critical analysis. The characteristics of the rhizome will provide the overarching structure for this essay. Firstly rhizomes can map in any direction from any starting point. This will guide the study of significant motifs in ‘The Waste Land.’ Secondly they grow and spread, via experimentation within a context. This will be reflected in the study of the voice and the language with which the poem opens. Thirdly rhizomes grow and spread regardless of breakage. This will allow for an

In T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem The Wasteland, a bleak picture of post-war London civilization is illuminated. The inhabitants of Eliot’s wasteland are living in a morally bankrupt and spiritually lost society. Through fragmented narration, Eliot recalls tales of lost love, misplaced lust, forgone spirituality, fruitless pilgrimages, and the “living dead”- those who shuffle through life without a care. These tales are the personal attempts of each person to fulfill the desires which plague them, though none ever stop to consider that what they want may not be what they need, nor do they consider why it is they feel they must do these things. Through studies in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective

The Waste Land, written by T.S. Eliot, is poem portraying the lack and/or the corruption of culture in England during the post WWI period. Eliot uses a form of symbolism, in which he uses small pieces from popular literary works, to deliver his message. He begins by saying that culture during the post WWI period is a “barren wasteland.” Eliot goes on to support this claim by saying that people in England are in a sort of shock from the violence of World War I. Eliot believes that the lack of culture open doors for immorality to grow among the populace.

Eliot’s creative use of poetic form is one of the hallmarks of “The Wasteland” and greatly contributed to the overall tone and mood. The structure of the poem is uneven and almost discordant. It rapidly transitions between various unrelated scenes at a rapid pace. For example, “I read, much of the night and go south in the winter/What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow…” (19-20) illustrates an abrupt shift in the setting which includes the speaker, time, and place. In the first line, the reader is listening to the story of Marie. In the second line, however, the reader has been transported to a desert: a literal wasteland. This choppy stream of images emphasizes a message about society: like the poem, society does not progress smoothly and can even be unpredictable.

This epigraph may serve as a way to connect with a certain group of scholars, as not many people speak the language it is written in, however, when it is read in its original context it may mean that Eliot does not foresee a very bright future, which would be in tune with the rest of the poem, furthermore this reference strongly hints at the use of tarot cards and the notion of randomness in the rest of the poem. The fact that this epigraph is in a foreign language greatly contributes to the theme of the poem and is therefore discussed in the next section of this paper. Followed by the epigraph is a quotation from the Anglican burial service, which serves as the subtitle of the first part of the poem: “1. The Burial of the Dead”. This leads us to additional intertextuality,