T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" - The Most Influential Work in Modern Literature
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.
In the first two lines of "The Waste Land," Eliot says, "April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land" (l. 1-2). Eliot shows the connection between death (emptiness) and life (fulfillment). Flowers and trees awaken and grow after the long, harsh winter months. The plants receive nutrients—and life—from the decayed remains of past vegetation. Yulisa Maddy’s No Past No Present No Future begins with the same ideas of new life beginning out of death. Joe Bengoh, after witnessing the fire that destroys his house, mumbles, "My parents dead?" (3). His callous words hardly conceal his true feelings of contempt for his parents. Joe’s suppressed jubilation is apparent in his next few thoughts. He thinks that, after the tragic death of his parents, Father O’Don will surely accept him at the mission house. In an attempt to make himself look troubled and distraught, Joe sticks his finger into his mouth and then rubs his eyes. Joe "kept on doing this until his eyes went red and felt as if he had been crying" (6). Joe ends up being accepted to the mission house, and he becomes inseparable from his new friends, Ade John and Santigie Bombolai. Joe’s new, positi...
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...ecognize these changes in his work.
The works of Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald follow Eliot’s, and America’s, ideas and trends. Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) also deals with World War I and the modern ideas toward sex. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) portrays the alcoholism and sexual promiscuity of the Jazz Age. In No Past No Present No Future, The "Brothers Three" use alcohol and drugs quite frequently, and they all tended to sleep around as well. The revolutionary ideas described in Eliot’s "The Waste Land" influenced many great writers in the past and continue to have an impact on authors today.
Works Consulted
Bible, The. New International Version. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1996.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998.
Maddy, Yulisa Amadu. No Past No Present No Future. Oxford: Heinemann, 1996.
Certain authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, wanted to reflect the horrors that the world had experienced not a decade ago. In 1914, one of the most destructive and pointless wars in history plagued the world: World War I. This war destroyed a whole generation of young men, something one would refer to as the “Lost Generation”. Modernism was a time that allowed the barbarity of the war to simmer down and eventually, disappear altogether. One such author that thrived in this period was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young poet and author who considered himself the best of his time. One could say that this self-absorption was what fueled his drive to be the most famous modernist the world had seen. As The New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean mentions in her literary summary of Fitzgerald’s works, “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty” (Orlean xi). One of the key factors that influenced and shaped Fitzgerald’s writing was World War I, with one of his most famous novels, This Side Of Paradise, being published directly after the war in 1920. Yet his most famous writing was the book, The Great Gatsby, a novel about striving to achieve the American dream, except finding out when succeeding that this dream was not a desire at all. Fitzgerald himself lived a life full of partying and traveling the world. According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, “In the 1920’s and 1930’s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity author whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920’s he stood for all-night partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure while in the 1930’s he stood for the gloomy aftermath of excess” (Baym 2124). A fur...
There are reasons that the Lord of the Rings trilogy has spanned nearly one hundred years, allowing children to connect with their grandparents through their love of the tale, and that stories like Harry Potter have defined a generation: the story of a journey is one that audiences love to hear. Reading and watching about journeys can make the reader/watcher experience that journey with the characters. Journeys, however, do not have to be fantastical or magical to be powerful to a person. T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, for example, were both modernist poets, but they were creators of journeys that seemed much simpler. This is not to say, however, that the journeys they wrote of were incredibly similar. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” both depict in first-person form physical journeys by the speakers, through a city and through the woods, respectively, but also the metaphorical journey taken through life. The speakers of each of these poems are in different stages of their life-journeys, which provides them each with a different perspective. The speakers also have very different attitude to their journeys, showing that the stage and setting of a journey can greatly affect how that journey is perceived by the journeyer.
When read for the first time, The Waste Land appears to be a concoction of sorts, a disjointed poem. Lines are written in different languages, narrators change, and the scenes seem disconnected, except for the repeated references to the desert and death. When read over again, however, the pieces become coherent. The Waste Land is categorized as a poem, but exhibited visually, it appears to be a literary collage. And when standing back and viewing the collage from afar, a common theme soon emerges. Eliot collects aspects from different cultures or what he calls cultural memories. These assembled memories depict a lifeless world, in which the barrenness of these scenes speak of a wasted condition. He concentrates on women, including examples of violence committed against them and the women's subsequent lack of response to this violence, to show how apathetic the world is. But The Waste Land is not a social commentary on the plight of women. Rather, the women's non-reaction to the violence against them becomes a metaphor for the impotence of the human race to respond to pain. Violence recurs throughout time, and as Eliot points to in his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" in the epigraph, we can break this cycle of violence and move ahead only by learning from the past and applying this knowledge to the present.
The 1920’s were a time of social and technological change. After World War II, the Victorian values were disregarded, there was an increase in alcohol consumption, and the Modernist Era was brought about. The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a perfect presentation of the decaying morals of the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald uses the characters in the novel--specifically the Buchanans, Jordan Baker, and Gatsby’s partygoers--to represent the theme of the moral decay of society.
Under little scrutiny, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms seem to have common themes, but beyond the surface, the two books are radically different. The Great Gatsby is a tale about an ambitious man, Jay Gatsby, his old girlfriend Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom Buchanan. Gatsby, after returning from war, becomes a bootlegger during Prohibition in an attempt to win back Daisy who is ironically unhappily married to Tom Buchanan. In contrast, A Farewell to Arms has a much less glamorous plot which focuses on Frederick Henry. Henry faces many obstacles due to his involvement in World War I. As a result of his hardship, he desserts his role in the army and attempts to escape the country with Catherine, his pregnant girlfriend. Fitzgerald’s writing style is much more descriptive and creative as compared to Hemingway’s bland and terse nature. Even with the similarities between the themes of war and the reactions of the novel’s characters to it, the two books have diverse characters, plots, settings, and styles.
main theme presented in Eliot’s poem shows that death is a part of life. Eliot points out
Fellowship is a method of connection in Middlemarch. With imagination, fellowship can be viewed as positive because it helps characters develop hope. Right before the meeting between Dorothea and Lydgate, the narrator describes Dorothea as “she was full of confident hope about this interview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of his personal reserve; never heeding that she was a very young woman. Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship” (Eliot 761). In this passage, the narrator brings back the idea of Theresa in the prelude of the novel as he depicts Dorothea as someone who does not care about the rumors related to Lydgate nor her position as a young woman. Dorothea only cares about establishing a bond with Lydgate that would help clear his name in Middlemarch. It is the image of hope that helps Dorothea and Lydgate establish a fellowship that will give them the strength to resolve Lydgate’s problems. However, the narrator warns the readers that “we are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of illusion” (Eliot 324). The narrator brings out the negative side of fellowship and image by stating that desire comes from images and that fellowship can be ambiguous because it is associated with illusion. Since human are imaginative creatures and fellowship is empowered by images, the downside of fellowship is inevitable. Due to the ambiguity of fellowship and the illusions created by the imaginative minds; fellowship turns bonds between characters into bondages that chains...
Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby established himself as a great American author. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is classified as modernism and highlights life during the Jazz Age. A dominant theme of the novel is the quest for the “American Dream.” Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is somewhat autobiographical; emphasizes the literary elements of setting, theme, and symbolism; and has received extensive criticism.
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.
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with the Jamesian note, "I read, much of the night, and go south in the
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go,” T.S. Eliot is basically trying to say that only people who push their limit can actually see how much they can really accomplish. T.S. Eliot made poetry that showed his negative views on life, people, and world. T.S. Eliot took poetry to another level by the way he writes and uses symbolism.
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.
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.
...ze anything other than the awful finality of despair. The sense of healing and salvation at the end of The Waste Land indicates that there is hope for meaning, even in fractured worlds and obfuscated poems. But it is up to each of us to discover it.