Literary Analysis of “The Waste Land”
When T.S Eliot wrote “The Waste Land”, just four years after World War 1, he was deeply troubled by the true nature of the people around him. People seemed too willing to abandon their cultures and submit to a rule of the mob. This coupled with the nearly nine million causalities of the war caused Eliot and many other artists to rethink their ideas of art and literature. In the resulting influx of experimental styles in art, T.S Eliot created “The Waste Land” to express his disgust with the modern sea of stupid, violent, and worst of all, average people ("T.S. Eliot Biography."). In the first section of the “The Waste Land,” T.S Eliot’s use of inconstant narration and setting, fragments of foreign languages,
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hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” Eliot uses this to tell the reader that he or she and everyone else who takes part in society is responsible for the horrid state of the world (Davidson). His use of a foreign language in this instance deceives the reader and postpones the moment that the reader discovers that he or she is being accused, paralleling the deceptive nature of society itself.
Finally, In “The Burial of the Dead”, Eliot combines enjambment (the act of ending the lines of a poem with words that end in -ing) and a perfect iambic pentameter in order to make each line of the poem sound incomplete even though it is technically complete. This can easily be seen in the following line (Shmoop Editorial Team). April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (The Waste Land, line 1-4)
Eliot’s use of iambic pentameter introduces the reader to a familiar and structured construct much like what society initially seems to be but when the reader continues to delve into either the poem or society, he or she discovers that they are both intrinsically alienating (Shmoop Editorial
The most obvious stylistic device used by Eliot is that of personification. She uses this device to create two people from her thoughts on old and new leisure. The fist person is New Leisure, who we can infer to be part of the growth of industry in the 19th century. He is eager and interested in science, politics, and philosophy. He reads exciting novels and leads a hurried life, attempting to do many things at once. Such characteristics help us to create an image of New Leisure as Eliot sees him.
During T. S. Eliot’s time many of his contemporaries including himself were in the custom of alluding to classic works of poetry. They incorporated references to notable texts like Dante. Eliot especially is a main perpetrator of alluding. Eliot has the ability create a picture for the reader and provide historical context to his works. A contemporary of Eliot, Pound, once said you should try to “be influenced by as many great artists as [they] can” (Pound 95). Eliot is following what Pound said by incorporating allusions in his works.
Gender conflict is based on the beliefs various societies have established on the roles men and women play in those cultures, and the change and breakdown of these roles is vital in the disintegration of all three texts. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' uses sex as a landmark to illustrate how low society has fallen, the separation of sex from love to Eliot stripped any beauty sex in the modern world could hold, as all significance is lost along with its connection to love. The loss of love is perhaps most clearly shown by the 'carbuncular' clerk for whom love, passion, nor even response is required in order for sexual gratification, his 'Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference.' The typist neither speaks nor acts in her own defence and so the clerk assumes a right to his own pleasure, it seems he almost hopes for her indifference, the attitude shown here starkly contrasts 'The change of Philomel, ...
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 poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T.S. Eliot creates a sense of emptiness by showing the moral failings of society and the loss of memory that is present throughout the world. Eliot creates this sense of a lack of morals by showing the thieving child who does not hesitate to reach out and steal a toy running along the pier, pocketing it without any reaction. Then Eliot mentioned that he could see nothing behind the child’s eye.” With this quote, Eliot uses a metaphor to create a sense of emptiness and lack of morality within the child, which is backed up by the lack of hesitation in the child’s actions. Eliot uses this to creates the sense that society does what it wants and to and does not consider others when doing so.
The work forced and challenged the reader to engage in classical literary works (i.e. Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Dante’s Inferno as well as multiple languages to be able to decipher and conceptualize the ideas that Eliot was trying to express. However, by drawing upon classical literary works and alternative languages, it could be argued the themes used placed the poem among the educated elite of society and excluded the under-educated working class, using language as a method to exclude certain groups. In spite of that, Eliot’s innovative approach to form and theme within the historical period of modernity (as defined above), led to The Waste Land being recognized as a key piece of modernist literature. Modernist art (including poetry) helped to reflect the socio-political climate, which was a time of rapid industrialization: the development of the steam engine, electricity, the automobile, and the development of synthetic material (Bullock, 1971, 58). These major industrial changes and their social impact forced a shift in political attitudes from the old ideologies of the bourgeois status based on land ownership, to bourgeois status based on those who owned the means of production (i.e.... ...
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
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.
...In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images God gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, diligent reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope.
In The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot offers a wonderful insight to the spiritual aspect of the modern world. The wasteland that is described in the poem consists of a dried up and waterless land. Throughout the poem, Eliot looks for us to find a solution on how to rescue ourselves from what is known as the wasteland. To come to the full solution, he asks that we must give ourselves in the way of sacrifice. Another way to look at sacrifice is in Christianity, it has a tie into the theme of love. In order to come to this solution, it is very important to look deeper into the meaning of the poem and the way it is related to religion. Through doing this, it is important that one looks at the symbolism that lies deep within the poem, and analyzes what it really means to the reader in a spiritual form. The spiritual symbol that most lead us to the solution of rescuing oneself from the wasteland is water and its influence in the theme of love in the poem.
Most first time readers of Eliot's work would, probably, agree that his poems read as bleak and depressing. They would also say that many of his poems portray society as having a terminal illness, but when we look deeper you can see that amid the anguish not all is lost and there is hope to be found among the ruins. "The Wasteland", is an amalgamation of fragmented images that are disturbing and, yet, at times beautifully poetic. The juxtaposition of the ugly landscape and the lyricism with which it is conveyed lend the poem an authenticity and originality. 'In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing…' The very fact that decay can be seen bathed in romantic moonlight and serenaded by singing grass reinforces the fact that out of something so desolate, something good can be seen or created. The narrator, though despondent with the degeneration of society, seems to have a genuine belief that there is good inside all men and if they could create as much as they destroyed the world could be a better place and not the barren wasteland that is before us now. This, I believe, is why he chooses to convey the desolation in this lyrical fashion. The fragmentary form of the poem reflects the fragmentary nature of man. Eliot has achieved this affect by applying various techniques. One example of this is how he uses time as a way of looking at the past, mixing modernity with the historic. In most cases the result is a mixture of regret with a strong desire to return to the past. ...
There are a number of these images in the works. Many of Picasso's are fairly evident the burning man in the right corner for example or the severed head on the bottom. These show the devastation of the world, as we know it. Eliot has recurring images not unlike these in The Waste Land. Eliot continually refers to the unnatural lack of water in the wasteland or the meaningless broken sex in the society of his day.
This poem is considered to be “one of the most difficult poems in a difficult literary period”. The Wasteland is a poem that is said to be one of his most influential works. At first glance, critics considered the poem to be too modern, but then opinions changed as they realized the poem reflected Eliot’s disillusionment with the moral decay of World War I in Europe. T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland combines theme, style, and symbolism to explore life and death. The Wasteland was written in 1922 and is a long poem divided into five sections.
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.