The Wasteland Analysis

The book, American Wasteland: How American Throw Away Nearly Half of Its Food, written by Jonathan Bloom, deeply describes the situation of food waste in America. The author, Bloom, starts off the book by mentioning that each day America squanders enough food tone fill up the Rose Bowl, the football stadium in Pasadena, California (xi). Bloom even brings out a specific number to prove that how much food were wasted in the United States, which is 160 billion pounds annually (xii). From that description and figure, we can see that food waste problem is really serious today.

In Anne Tyler’s “Teenage Wasteland,” the reader is given insight into the difficulty of parenting through Daisy’s desperate attempt to stop her son from his seemingly uncontrollable downward spiral. The paranoia of her “perfect” parenting techniques leads to the tainting of Donny’s innocence over time and eventually his mysterious disappearance at the end of the story. Through symbols of innocence and corruption, Tyler demonstrates the importance of keeping one’s head clear and focused while parenting, and that using common sense and logic is far more effective than relying on idealism and hope.

Hughes picks up on the inferiority of mankind in comparison to “unkillable” nature. Hughes conveys the idea that nature is immortal and lives off our deads’ remains, we see this through the listing of “tributary graves” being part of what the North Sea “swallows”. This imagery is morbid and voices Hughes’ anti-pastoral feeling. He uses this poem to establish that nature is not

The question must be asked, when did food waste become an issue? Jonathan Bloom writer of, Jonathan Bloom’s American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) explored this question. Bloom’s book, discussed in Stacy Slate’s article “Who's To Blame for All We Waste? We Are. A Review of American Wasteland,” describes how our change in respect for food happened over many centuries. In the 1700s people were just starting to make settlements, so their goal was to live as simply as they could. They only grew food that was needed. In the 1900s, the Great Depression and World War II resulted in non-existent food waste. Waste was considered unpatriotic. By the end of World War II, food was cheaper because

In households across America, teenagers and parents do not traditionally get along. Donny a teenage boy is no different, he believes his parents don't know anything about a teenager’s life, he does not get along with his parents at all. His school recommends that he should get a tutor, but the tutor was not serious, he let the kids mess around and he did not, tutor Donny like he said he would. Donny got worse and went crazy and it all led to bad things and then he ended up running away. In the story Teenage Wasteland By. Anne Tyler the author expresses that you should listen to your parents because they know whats best for you and they want the best for you.

T.S Eliot’s poem, “The winter evening settles down” is a short, simple to read poem with several different examples of imagery. Eliot uses descriptive words, for instance, “withered leaves”, “broken blinds”, and “lonely cab-horse” (lines 7-10). He paints an extremely bleak image of a town that seems to be deserted of people. The tone of the poem plays hand-in-hand with the imagery used. This town is an unpleasant place where it has seemed to be neglected for some years now. Eliot’s use of imagery takes the reader to this deserted, torpid place; however, at the same time, his goal is to bring the life back into this grim town.

In The Waste Land, the speaker tells of the “flash of lightning” and “damp gust” that promises rain, but first, to earn the rain, humanity must listen to the advice of the thunder. In the Hindu faith, the thunder’s roar of “DA” tells all of humanity, the gods, men, and demons, how to work together to have peace and morality. “Datta” tells the gods to give, “Dayadhvam” tells humans to have compassion, and “Damyata” tells the demons to have self-control (Eliot 432). With the inclusion of these tenets of Hinduism, Eliot, as the prophet, longs to gain harmony in the world, a world that includes the love and hope that all cultures and faiths have to give. Rather than looking to a Holy Grail that is out of reach of the common man, Eliot presents a solution in his poem that humanity already possesses the answer. He gives practical steps towards earning the rain that the thunder promises through fellowship and unity instead of war and division. In the final stanza, Eliot quotes Dante’s Purgatorio in the original Italian which says, “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina” (Eliot 427). Translated, this line means, “Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them.” While the pain of the present mixed with the immorality of the past seem

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

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

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

This reinforces Eliot's claim that, 'Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood'. The theme's that run throughout 'The Wasteland', such as sterility, isolation and death, are applicable to both the landscapes and the characters. When drawn together, it is these themes that give the poem structure and strength, and the use of myth mingled with historic, anthropological, religious and metaphysical images reinforce its universal quality.

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,