Essay about the wasteland

By looking through a critical lens at T Stearns Eliot’s poetry in light of his 20th century, modernist context, much is revealed about his personal and the rapidly evolving societal beliefs of that era. Through his repeating motif of time and fragmentation throughout his poems, Eliot reveals the prevalent feelings of isolation while in society along with the need to hide one’s feelings and emotions in this degrading society. His exploration of the use of ambiguity and stream of consciousness by Eliot, which is a characteristic of modernist artists, allows his work to resound over decades while being interpreted and differently understood by every audience that encounters them.

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

Elliot is seen as one of the most influential modernistic poet of all time. Elliot’s poems evidently highlight the real face of modern man and modern existence by exploring the social realms that society is placed under in a desolately described, modernistic world. TS Elliot describes the industrialised world in both J Alfred Prufrock and Preludes as a disjointed, dehumanised world where mundane activities are ever-present in people’s lives. Elliot focuses on using the character’s viewpoint through the stream of consciousness as a means of highlighting the major concerns of modernism. His poems J Alfred prufrock and Preludes disclose the major concerns of modernism associated with the backdrop of the bleak, industrialised world, that is

“London” by William Blake is a poem composed of four quatrains with rhyming lines. “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Dr Hyde” is a mystery novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Both of these presentations are written in the 1800’s in London. Blake and Stevenson find London awful and they are tired of everything that is bad about the city. The writers portray a nightmarish imagery of the urban experience through these two texts mostly during the ‘midnight streets’.

Hence this picture of a dystopian city. The main character Winston Smith’s environment is depicted through the distinctively visual ideas shown in ‘ vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron’ this is using imagery and descriptive language to set the scene for the audience much like the beginning of shoe horn sonata. The eye on my slide corresponds with the Repetition of ‘big brother is watching you’.

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

Preventative measures are not good enough either: “London, [Perowne’s] small part of [the world], lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities” (286). Perowne, and by extension McEwan, conclude that the only effective response is love and empathy. Mimicking adages cemented in posterity, McEwan imparts to his readers Arnold’s message in his final stanza that love is the only way to approach “a darkling plain” (291), a new era of incertitude and tremendous possibilities. Empathy, as shown through Perowne’s compassionate response to Baxter’s intrusion, functions as an imperative that people need to think beyond the nearsighted landscape of the quotidien. Much like Perowne’s nerve endings “peeled and stripped clean” (280), McEwan argues that the inward-focused attitude present in society must be left behind, replaced with a society sensitively responds to its

The generation before Eliot’s was provided a purpose in life through religion. Religion offered an explanation for how people came to be, a sense of self, and oneness with the universe. The vast majority of those living in the modern world no longer incorporate religion into their daily lives and thus lack an understanding and appreciation for life. In Eliot’s believed, people rely on “heap(s) of broken images” in order to construct their ideas of religion (22). One can identify themselves as a follower of a certain religion, but have no spiritual connection to a higher power or level of understanding the world. This is the problem for Eliot. The modern expectation is that one will find salvation, relief from modern woes, and/or understanding simply by going thru the motions. Religion and spirituality are thought to be one in the same. But in actuality, spirituality can be present in any religion. Religion is what spirituality is filtered through. No matter one’s religion, spirituality will sustain us in the modern world.

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

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,