T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a complex and fragmented poem that underwent major revisions before it was published in 1922. The published version we see and read today is considerably shorter in comparison to what Eliot had originally written. According to James Torrens’s article “The Hidden Years o f the Waste Land Manuscript,” Eliot had mailed “54 pages of The Waste Land, including the unused parts” to John Quinn, a “corporation lawyer in New York City,” which had shortly disappeared after Quinn’s death in July of 1924 (Cuddy 60). Eliot’s “lost” pages were not uncovered until the early 1950s (Ford). In 1971, a facsimile of the original drafts of “The Waste Land,” edited by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, was published and revealed how much …show more content…
This part appears as the second stanza in the original draft starting at line fifty-five in which the first fifty-four lines before went unpublished (see Figure 1). In Richard Ellmann’s “The First Waste Land,” he perfectly summarizes what Eliot’s original beginning was as a “conversational passage describing an evening on the town, starting at ‘Tom’s place’…moving to a brothel, and concluding with a bathetic sunrise” (Cuddy 168). While reading the original draft, the speaker seems to be a soldier who is reminiscing about the past. For instance, when it says, “Sergeant, I said, I’ve only kept a decent house for twenty years” (Eliot 5). The speaker is talking to someone of higher rank which can indicate that the speaker is a soldier in the war. After reading the first fifty-four lines of Eliot’s draft, it seems that the speaker is remembering a time spent with friends at some point during their leave. Then in the middle of the section the speaker changes to an aristocratic woman named Marie, who recalls childhood memories of sledding and drinking coffee. The happy memories are then replaced by a description of a desolate land in the third stanza, “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief” (Eliot 23). There is no indication of the connection between the two speakers in this section is, but it can be interpreted as two people which had a romantic …show more content…
Eliot’s “The Waste Land” I found that the meaning did not change due to the heavy cuts made by both Eliot and Ezra Pound. At first, I thought that the parts which were removed would have affected the meaning of the poem, but instead, it did not. All the large cuts from the poem involved around one person. For instance, in “The Burial of the Dead,” the original fifty-four lines only seem to be following the evening of one particular speaker which can be interpreted as a soldier, who appears at the end of the section in the published version. In “The Fire Sermon,” the large part that was edited out involved describing -- in rhyming couplets -- a lady named Fresca and the fourth section, “Death by Water,” involved a four-page tale about the Phoenician sailor. Each deleted part was unique in their own way but none significantly change how the poem is read. I found these deleted portions of text were either unnecessary or did not quite fit in with what Eliot was trying to convey about the postwar Europe and the type of wasteland it has become. However, when it comes to “The Waste Land” there seems to be no one true
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems, New York, London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1988
T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is considered by many to be the most influential work in modern literature. First published in 1922, it captures the feelings and sentiments of modern culture after World War I. Line thirty of "The Waste Land," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," is often viewed as a symbol of mankind’s fear of death and resulting love of life. Eliot’s masterpiece—with its revolutionary ideas—inspired writers of his era, and it continues to affect writers even today.
Mortal loss was more than just a threat at the time T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste
Eliot's Themes of Death and Futility in the Poem Remind Your Self of The Hollow Men
Beginning the second part of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a Game of Chess. This section focuses on two opposing scenes, one of high society and one of the lower classes. The first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed woman surrounded by marvelous furnishings. As she waits for a lover, her neurotic thoughts become frantic, and her day culminates for a game of chess. The second part of this section shifts to a bar, where two women discuss a third woman. The bartender constantly calls out, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” (the bar is closing). In between the bartender’s announcements, one of the women recounts a conversation with her friend Lil, whose husband has just been discharged from the army. She complains about her lacking of bettering herself; getting false teeth so her husband won’t chase after other women. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the medication required for an abortion; seeing she almost died afte...
The early poetry of T. S. Eliot, poems such as "The Wasteland" or "The Love Song
In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” offers an interpretation of the modern world that on one hand underscores the disillusionment of the future in a world that is fragmented and bare, and on the other hand, presents a case for recognizing freedom and meaning in the “heap of broken images” that make up the modern climate. The opening segment “The Burial of the Dead” looks toward a future that is composed of fragments and paradox. The fragments in the waste land that is presented are that of memory. More specifically, the fragments represent a failure in the human condition to connect memories of the past to those of the present in a way that is hopeful and inspiring. Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley present this concept in Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Here they describe a waste land in which “She [Marie] perceives the dualistic and paradoxical present as cruel because, in remembering the past and intuiting the future, sh...
The influence of World War I was also seen in Eliot’s work. According to Johnson, “…artists clung to the shards of classical culture as a buffer against nihilistic disillusionment. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land" (1922)” (1). Eliot’s writing in “The Waste Land” depicts scenes of war and also ties into the destruction of western culture.
Eliot is full of symbolism. This poem is different from the narrative poem of realism and the lyric poem of romanticism, but it is typical of symbolic poetry. The poem overall involves in some ancient mythology and shows the modern wasteland and people. The "Waste Land" is the symbol of the modern Europe, but also the symbol of modern people. Water is the oasis of life, but also the symbol of disaster. The hyacinth is a symbol of spring, and skeletons are a symbol of death, etc. The poet is good at using symbolism to put a series of disparate "pictures" together, combining many irrelevant images to form a subjective emotion. These five poems not only hint at the inevitable declining trend of western civilization and reflect the historical perspective, but also it has the realistic
Faced with a world lacking variety, viewpoints, vibrancy, and virtue- a world without life- a fearful and insecure T.S. Eliot found himself the only one who realized all of civilization had been reduced to a single stereotype. Eliot (1888-1965) grew up as an outsider. Born with a double hernia, he was always distinguished from his peers, but translated his disability into a love of nature. He developed a respect for religion as well as an importance for the well-being of others from his grandfather at a young age, which reflected in his poetry later in life. After studying literature and philosophy at Harvard, Eliot took a trip to Paris, absorbing their vivid culture and art. After, he moved on to Oxford and married Vivien Haigh-Wood. Her compulsivity brought an immense amount of stress into his life, resulting in their abrupt separation. A series of writing-related jobs led Eliot to a career in banking and temporarily putting aside his poetry, but the publication of “The Waste Land” brought him a position at the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer. His next poem, called “The Hollow Men” reflected the same tone of desolation and grief as “The Waste Land.” Soon after, he made a momentous shift to Anglicanism that heavily influenced the rest of his work in a positive manner. Eliot went on to marry Valerie Fletcher, whom he was with until the end of his life, and win a Nobel Prize in literature. T.S. Eliot articulates his vast dissatisfaction with the intellectual desolation of society through narrators that share his firm cultural beliefs and quest to reinvigorate a barren civilization in order to overcome his own uncertainties and inspire a revolution of thought.
...to subjects relevant to today, such as religion.Eliot argues that without religion we are all lack direction and more importantly we lack substance in our lives. Without religion, we are superficial and it is due to this that we turn to pop culture. Pop culture is a filler for that which is intellectually rewarding. Eliot recognized this and for this reason he wrote “The Wasteland”. Eliot’s poem made bold statements about what was really happening in the modern world. Whether one argue with Eliot’s positions or not, his work joins the canon of the classic and ironically provides an opportunity for readers to plug into something greater.
Ceremonies are prevalent throughout T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Eliot relies on literary contrasts to illustrate the specific values of meaningful, effectual rituals of primitive society in contrast to the meaningless, broken, sham rituals of the modern day. These contrasts serve to show how ceremonies can become broken when they are missing vital components, or they are overloaded with too many. Even the way language is used in the poem furthers the point of ceremonies, both broken and not. In section V of The Waste Land, Eliot writes,
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
As its amplitude and frequency increase, the poem-wave loses any sense of a finite subject in a particular historical situation’ (Alright, 21). Not only specific to H.D, this measure of poetry could also be used to analyze some poems by Eliot and Pound. A central tenant of this kind of poetics is the frequent use of aquatic metaphors where the whole world is described in the form of an ocean – which recurs frequently in Eliot’s poems like ‘The Wasteland’, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Four Cantos’ and so on- a more specific example being H.D’s ‘Oread’ where she