The 1920’s are often referred to as the roaring twenties. It is customarily described as the golden age, boisterous and wild time period (Meredith 51). Contrary to this popular belief, authors, T.S Eliot, Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald described this time period differently. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land vividly describes the very state the world was found in after World War I. Eliot examines the way the land is left desolate, and the way the people act and live. Both the novels The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises exemplify the ideas and concepts Eliot describes. Characters in these works represent solipsism, ennui, lack of values and conditions found in The Waste Land. Ezra Pound wrote, “Pound's greatest service to Hemingway may well be directing him to Eliot's poetry just when The Waste Land made Eliot the dominant poet of Literary Modernism” (Flora 2012). Eliot’s writing greatly influenced many writers of his time period and there after. The beginning of The Waste Land begins by describing a scenery, “April is the cruellest month,” (Eliot 5) this exemplifies the season change and how it bares all of the imperfections that the snow shielded. Dead trees and unpleasant sights are exposed. This is true not only for physical surroundings, but also spiritually as well. People buried their thoughts and feelings much like the snow did the unpleasant landscape. People ignored the condition of their atmosphere and revealed no emotion or effort to change it. People can become so far removed from their environment making them indifferent to what goes on around them. Rather than working to put the shattered remnants back together, they retracted from society and their emotions instead. They bare no feelings, thoughts or p... ... middle of paper ... ...le but change is possible. The most important piece of the poem is that even in the darkest times you can emerge and move forward. At the end of The Sun Also Rises , Brett states that her and Jake would have had a good time with one another, Jake replies with, “ Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (Hemingway 251). This signifies that Jake has been able to grow and begin to encompass the values. Jake has demonstrated that people can evolve and that there is hope for all. At the end of The Great Gatsby a similar situation occurs. Nick comes to the conclusion that he can choose his destiny and he does not have to be like the careless people that surrounded him. The novel ends with,“ So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (Fitzgerald ). Each work is about a journey that leads to a common consensus, that there is still hope.
In the aftermath of World War I, the 1920s twinkled on the horizon with the promise of hope. Bookended by the epidemic of 1920 and the The Wall Street crash of 1929, the decade was a time of decadence, frivolity, and escape. Rich or poor, people lived in the moment, loved anything new and the young partied like there was no tomorrow. A readers look into the decade can be found in the era's greatest memoir: The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald. F. Scott Fitzgerald applied the social and political issues of the 1920's and its innumerable characteristics to enhance the plot of The Great Gatsby.
There are several other places and occurrences in these novels that show how much people unknowingly care for eachother and desire to socialize with one another. Although T.S. Eliot believed that modern society in the 1920’s lacked a vital sense of community and a spiritual center, character interactions, events, and places in Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Great Gatsby prove otherwise.
The beauty and splendor of Gatsby's parties masked the innate corruption within the heart of the Roaring Twenties. Jazz-Age society was a bankrupt world, devoid of morality, and plagued by a crisis of character. Jay Gatsby is a misfit in this world. He tries, ironically, to fit into the picture: he fills his garage with status, his closet with fashion, his lawns with gaiety, his mannerisms with affectation. However, he would never be one of "them". Ironically, his loss seems to Nick Caraway to be his greatest asset. Nick reflects that Gatsby's drive, lofty goals, and, most importantly, dreams set him apart from this empty society. Fitzgerald effectively contrasts the dreamer, Jay Gatsby, against a world referred to by Gertrude Stein as the "Lost Generation", and by T.S. Eliot as "The Wasteland".
The 1920s were a time of big dreams, moral decline, and hardships in America . The Roaring Twenties were a different time altogether with its bootleggers and speakeasies, women becoming more independent, the poor becoming poorer, but through all this was The American Dream keeping the hope afloat. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured this era in his book, The Great Gatsby. Through his many symbols he illustrates the hopes, the forgotten God, and the oppressed Americans of the Twenties. The symbols in The Great Gatsby help convey several different themes, from wealth to loss of morals, to poverty.
Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1447-1463.
The rollercoaster story of the life of a successful man, Jay Gatsby, chasing his dream and living in an affluent suburban area outside of New York, known in the story as West Egg, captures an era of American history referred to as “the roaring 20’s.” The 1920’s was a crazy time in American history: rapidly growing economy, extreme cultural changes, and rights movements. On the surface, the 1920’s appeared to be a great era, but upon further exploration, it wasn’t all good. If America has learned anything from it’s history, it is that you can’t judge a book by its cover.
The 1920’s were a time of economic indulgences. The stock market was in a period of wild growth and Americans were enjoying their newfound prosperity. America just came off a triumphant success in the First World War and the 1920’s and was the outlandish victory party. The New York Times said, “Gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession” of the 1920’s. The morality which the common citizen had previously upheld became corrupted, and the American Dream, which once meant making a living through integrity and hard work, became tainted, emphasizing the quick, not necessarily honest, acquisition of money and wasteful spending. The life, desires, and ultimate failure of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald deprecates
T.S. full name is Thomas Stearns Eliot. He had written a total of 68 poems, dramas, etc. in total (Wikipedia). There are many influences, but I think that Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Eliot`s first wife, Ezra Pound, his mentor and religion are one of the biggest influences on T.S. Eliot.
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.
Message of Hope in Eliot's The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The theme of Prufrock is the negative, individuality repressing effect that society has on its people. The Prufrock persona illustrates this, he is alienated by the inane social rituals that define his life, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” and make it insignificant and useless. The Waste Land’s theme is that the world, in particular western civilisation, is a culturally and spiritually barren place. Society is portrayed as a pile of “…stony rubbish…”, the ruins of a once great city now reduced to rubble where nothing can grow. Lives mean nothing, but the poem also offers hope through a return to basic religious values, ending with the repeated chant of “Shantih shantih shantih”, which means, “the peace which passeth understanding”. The poems both portray the same basic idea, but they have two main differences. Firstly, there is the way in which the themes are expressed. In Prufrock , Eliot uses a persona as an example of the debilitating effect of living with so many expectations, rules, standards and meaningless rituals has on a the individual. In many ways, this is a very effe...
Different speakers in "The Waste Land" mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20th-century life -- various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind -- have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this time period is forced to shore these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.
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.
T.S. Eliot and Yulisa Amadu Maddy both address the topics of fear of death and then correlative love of life, but from entirely different points of view. T.S. Eliot wrote during a time when people were questioning relativity, especially moral relativity and it's effect on life after death. Maddy wrote about young boys who were going through that time in a teenager's life when they realize that they will die someday. Thus, teenagers begin to acknowledge death while embarking on their search for love and the meaning of life.
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,