The Wasteland Essay

Waste land is a very powerful documentary, where Vik Muniz takes us to a different world, but during the time he’s presenting this place one can relate with the humans living there. They live from others trash, some are ashamed of what they do, others are proud of what they do, but most of them if not all believe that is a dignifying job, their way of leaving.

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.

This poem brought me back to my home town and the wonders and beauty that it brings around winter time, and made me nostalgic with memories of past winters with my family and slightly saddened for those who have never seen the magical ability snow has. This poem reminded me that there are people who live in states where their change in seasons is not as noticeable, as the ones that I grew up with and have come to miss. Similar to many of the romantics, natures true beauty can transform the mundane into a work of art that would never have existed

Growing up in the recent generations is very challenging. Children at such young ages, even younger than teens have been faced with such perilous decisions. It is especially hard for teenagers to find acceptance at this point in their lives. Here is an instance that is so common in this day and age, yet this particular case is only fiction. A teenage boy named Donny has been going through a few changes in his appearance. His parents, Matt and Daisy, are somewhat disturbed yet they don’t say much to him. Then one day Daisy gets a call from Donny’s school administrator and tells her that his grades are attitude are dropping scale. He eventually gets kicked out of private school and does poorly in

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

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.

The environment that one is living in can supply hope. Todd Davis showed this through a seasonal metaphor. The narrator of the poem talks about weather changing and getting better, providing the metaphor. The weather getting warmer and the arrival of spring symbolizes new life and a new start. The narrator ponders, “I’m not sure/ why he couldn’t wait,” then later talks about blossoms opening (Davis 787, 4-5). This quote and other hints about spring are discussing how the new season is bringing new hope for many. The narrator says that “we understand/ the ones who decide to leave us in February” (Davis 787, 5-6). This is discussing how during the winter, life can feel so

In the story Teenage Wasteland, Donny is kind of a dump. Donny is one of those bad kids that gets into trouble all the time. His parents don’t realise where he’s going until the time when the story takes place. His mom gets him a tutor, who lets him do kind of whatever he wants, so he ends up getting expelled from school. The takeaway of this story is that you should try hard in school and life.

Historically speaking the fate of world has always been called into the question. The same is true of commentaries on the state of mankind. T.S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland" is considered by many to be the greatest poem of all time. During Eliot’s time, the world was beginning to place more value on pop culture than high culture. Gone were the days where most were familiar with the works of the greats. The Wachowski Brothers’ film, The Matrix, deals with similar themes as "The Wasteland" . The science fiction film set in world that has been taken over by machines and centers around the plight of unsuspecting hero, Neo and other who have been freed from the computer simulated reality of The Matrix. Both worlds of “The Wasteland” and The Matrix

The possibly most emphasized literary concept within most high-school english curriculum has to be the allusion. It is an important lesson in comprehension for people to learn how to recognize when a work alludes to another, and for what reasons they do so. High-school literature courses generally wean their students into being able to recognize allusions by introducing literary works that only take use of the most recognized allusions. Once the students have on-par comprehension, the curriculum allows for more obscure allusions to challenge the students. For what reason, however, is there a necessity for these challenging, obscure allusions to exist?

Some people would say that in their life that they have become closer to God or have developed a spiritual awakening once they have accepted their sexuality but others would say that once they came to terms with their sexuality they found no place for a relationship with God in their lives due to the constant rejection that the church has towards LGBT people. In The Wasteland the various characters are living in immoral states doing things that one may consider “sinful” which can be compared to the LGBT community and how their religious communities view them since they have substantial evidence based off their scriptures and traditions, but morality as taught in the bible, is sometimes subjective and changes overtime since different people

The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, is a journey through the arid, unproductive modern world. This poem was written post World War I when the world was still recovering. Evidence of the war could still be seen. The ground was still battle worn, and man still broken of spiritual guidance. This current state of being is what fueled Eliot’s writing. Through the poem, he connects the conditions of modern society to an infertile world void of water and spirituality. Despite the desert-like setting, there are countless images of water throughout the writing with numerous ways to illustrate them. Water plays many roles in the poem as we see its raw power. It can hurt as well as help. There is also fear of too much or too little. The portrayal of the water shows similar qualities to that of spirituality. The poem links them together to almost flow in the same manner. Water in The Waste Land can then be symbolized to a god-like figure; being the bringer of birth, fertility, death, and resurrection – hope.

One of an author’s greatest tasks is to strike a balance between showing, and telling certain details of a story. Telling too little often leaves the reader lost and isolated, where revealing too much forces ideas into the reader head, leaving them feeling unsatisfied and uninspired. T.S Eliot’s modernist work, The Wasteland, is one of the most decorated pieces of modernist poetry that is skillfully constructed into shards of fragmented scenes that depict the decay of western culture. Before revision, the poem was more than twice the length it was by the time it reached publication. With the help of a dear friend and exceptionally talented editor Ezra Pound, Eliot was able to slim the poem down to a mere 434 lines. Where in the draft Eliot seems weary, and coats his poem in a security blanket of excessive descriptive detailed form, the revised version allows the reader to focus on the content of the piece with little distraction.

Modernism was a prevalent movement and developed an era in the twentieth century that shaped the coming decades and Western ideas. Stemming from World War I, its culture, art and philosophy reveals the mindset of modernity and how the historical events of that time influenced life and society. T.S. Eliot was a part of the literary and artistic movement called Modernism, which can be seen best in his poem “The Waste Land.” The concept of the wasteland was a powerful one to his generation. His poem depicts an image of the modern world through the perspective of “the common man” finding himself hopeless and confused about the condition of society. The poem paints a picture of a disjointed and desolate world through apparent confusion and chaos that that is achieved through fragments and allusions. “The Waste Land” demonstrates the present-day wasteland as a metaphor of modern Europe to depict the loss of culture and history that was suffered due to the war.

“The Waste Land” changed the course of poetry and all forms of expression for good. As a benchmark of modernist poetry, T.S. Eliot's poem used World War I as motivation and put to words the destruction of the world and the minds of so many humans around the world. The ideas in the poem contrast the images put forth and force the reader to feel the chaos, pessimism, confusion, and collapse of human values that modernists know. After the war, the world was totally different and never was the same. Eliot recognized this change and sought to create a form of art that would stump many scholars and transcend poetry for years and years to come. He aimed to answer the questions of poetry’s response to World War I. In T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” two traditional and sacred images of rebirth and sanctuary, Spring and religion, are turned upside down into eerie metaphors of death and destruction.