What Is The Theme Of The Waste Land

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

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 world was de-scribed as a wasteland. The term comes from T. S. Eliot poem The Waste Land, one of the most important poems of the 20th century, which illustrated the omnipresent confusion. The Waste Land was not only a cultural desert. It was described by Currell as “a cultural detri-tus” where the past and present interfere with each and produce chaos. The poem presents the world as barren and infertile but with a chance for a revival. Parts from the text perfect-ly mirror the mood of the Twenties; living in a culture which will not expire, but marked by decay and forced to continue in the shadows of its former glory. However, the term “waste land” is also adequate to portray the people. Its civilization, described as lost, is in a con-stant search for meaning in the wilderness of ideas and faith (2009: 37). The waste land is in their bodies and minds; they suffer from impaired communication abilities and seem to forget their humanity. People are frozen in a sexual failure, a moment of

Throughout both ‘Engleby’ and ‘Selected Poems’ there is a prevailing sense of ‘apprehension of the tenuousness of human existence’ which is evident in the protagonists’ confining inability to communicate with the world around them, as seen in Prufrock’s agonised call, ‘so how should I presume?’. ‘The Wasteland’ was written by Eliot to ‘address the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of [contemporary] culture’, questioning mankind’s ability to move forward into cohesiveness despite the ‘more pronounced sense of disillusionment and cynicism’ which came about as a ‘direct

1. Allusion- making a reference to a place, figure, or event so the reader can compare-someone referring their vacation to the Garden of Eden

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 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

In part one 'The Burial of the dead', Eliot opens with a scene of isolation and desolation. 'April is the cruellest month…'which is an inversion of what spring represents, this being new life and hope. It is seen here as cruel because, for Marie, it stirs memories, which are no longer there and have led nowhere. He follows this image of isolation with an image of togetherness, 'Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow…' She recalls being free in the mountains, but freedom involves taking risks and she hesitates and goes 'south in the winter'. Marie's memories portray the shallowness of the aristocracy and in many ways we are reminded of the ladies in Prufrock who 'come and go talking of Michael Angelo'. There talking leads nowhere and so by implication their lives are meaningless and dead, as dead as the wasteland.

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.

“The Wasteland,” written by American-born British poet T.S. Eliot, is an epic poem that characterizes the Modernist movement. The poem captures the gloomy mindset of post-WWI society and profoundly guides the savage destruction of the Great War. “The Wasteland” was Eliot’s masterpiece and went on to become one of the most influential poems of the 20th century. It exemplifies many of his specific techniques and is well-known because of its inventive poetic form. In the poem, Eliot skillfully utilizes form, symbolism, and diction to depict the horrors of war’s aftermath, signify the death of Western culture, and convey the dreary worldwide view of the Modernist movement.

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,