The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
In the poem, The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot gives a primarily positive connotation by using the theme of speech, language, and failure of speech. In each of the sections, Eliot shows how speech and communication are important in life. He also shows that speech cannot always accomplish what actions can. The way the characters in the poem use speech show that speech and communication are important.
A Game of Chess
This section may be the best example of communication in the whole poem. While many of the other themes are present, the main part of this section deal with the interaction between two people, in two different places. Although at first these conversations seem to be very fruitless and unproductive, at the end it is revealed that what was trying to be
accomplished by the conversations happens anyway.
The first part of A Game of Chess tells of a man and a woman having dinner. A very elaborate description of the dinner scene, the woman, and the sights and smells that fill the room. After dinner to woman tries to engage the man in conversation but to no avail. As she continues to get more frustrated with and his unwillingness to answer her questions, it would seem Eliot is showing how speech and communication do not accomplish their intended goals. The woman keeps asking the man what he wants to do after dinner, but only his thoughts are revealed to the
reader, he does not respond to the woman. Eventually after the woman's tiring effort to get a response they still end up taking a carriage ride and playing a game of chess. So while the woman thought that she was getting no where with him, she actually achieved exactly what she wanted. In this sense a transformation occurs from the point in...
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...ng is the salvation of the Waste Land. When the rains finally come, the thunder speaks with the voice of the gods. It repeats over and over the word "Da", which comes from the Upanishads. It can be translated in three different ways by the gods, man, or demons. This shows that while one thing is said it can be
interpreted in many ways depending upon the listener. No matter how it is interpreted though, the thunder and its voice have renewed this arid place. Once more Eliot shows that communication is the key to keeping the world from becoming a Waste Land, and that it is the only thing that can save it.
All these examples from each section show how Eliot uses speech and failure of speech to give the image of the poem a positive connotation. The way that Eliot presents this theme in the poem is positive because he shows that speech and communication are important.
The informal language and intimacy of the poem are two techniques the poet uses to convey his message to his audience. He speaks openly and simply, as if he is talking to a close friend. The language is full of slang, two-word sentences, and rambling thoughts; all of which are aspects of conversations between two people who know each other well. The fact that none of the lines ryhme adds to the idea of an ordinary conversation, because most people do not speak in verse. The tone of the poem is rambling and gives the impression that the speaker is thinking and jumping from one thought to the next very quickly.
...e state of waste is not perpetual, we can find strength and hope for a better future. The ability to convey these messages with such strength along with the ability to powerfully effect his audience and have a tangible effect on the world is what sets T. S. Eliot and The Wasteland apart, and truly gives his poetry the power to change the world.
The poem told the story of a man who is inhibited by language, and has never quite had the ability to articulate his thoughts and feeling through words. It is said that his family members have tried
Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot; a Poem by Poem Analysis. New York:
Suddenly, the reader understands that the poet intends to deliver a specific message, luring his audience to delve into the poem in search of it. Half of Eliot’s message is indeed clear with his title: we are living in the waste land now. The bulk of the poem he spends showing his audience how we have established for ourselves this waste of a land and the manners in which we continue to waste it- and consequently humanity- primarily with our ennui. Everything builds to the dramatic, and highly ambiguous, conclusion presented in meditation V, “What the Thunder Said”. This conclusion is the other half of Eliot’s message in which the poet expresses man’s only hope for salvation, leading ultimately to life in a land restored to its natural state, and not the atrophied world we now inhabit.
Poems are often difficult to understand. They are written in an indirect way, but this allows authors to portray themes differently than in other pieces of literature. Various literary techniques display these themes, and the indirect way of stating them forces readers to use a deeper level of thought. T. S. Eliot, for instance, expresses a human tendency in his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” By using personification, symbolism, and allusions, he displays the tendency of individuals to worry about what others will think about them, their thoughts, and their actions.
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 Buddha's sermon that preaches the path to ridding one’s self of suffering. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” alludes to Buddhism and Buddha’s “ Fire Sermon” in order to shed light on humanity’s detrimental condition, and offers a remedy through the themes of birth, rebirth, and the symbols of water and fire.
...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.
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,
In the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot transformed the traditional poetry form into a more modern style. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 26, 1888. At the age of 25, Eliot moved to England where he began his career as a poet. Eliot greatly attracted the modernist movement, which was poetry written in the reaction of Victorian poetry. His first poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, was known as one of the most famous pieces of the Modernist movement. In his poetry, Eliot combines themes such as aridity, sexuality, and living death. He uses techniques such as narration, historical, literary, and mythic allusions. Using themes and techniques from his earlier work, Eliot publishes The Wasteland.
...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.
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’s poem, The Waste Land, is written in the mood of society after World War I. By using these allusions, The Waste Land reflects on mythical, historical, and literary events. The poem displays the deep disillusionment felt during this time period. In the after math of the great war, in an industrialized society that lacks the traditional structure of authority and belief, in the soil that may not be conductive to new growth (Lewis). Eliot used various allusions that connected to the time period and the effect of the war on society in his poem. Aided by Eliot’s own notes and comments, scholars have been able to identify allusions to: the Book of Common Prayer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles-Louis Philippe, James Thomas, Guillaume Appollinaire, Countess Marie Larsich, Wyndham Lewis, nine books of the Bible, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Wagner, Sappho, Catullus, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, J.G. Frazer, Jessie L. Weston, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelair, Dente, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and John Webster—all within the first section of 72 lines, about one allusion every two lines (Lewis). Using various allusions, Eliot was able to connect to the fact that he lived in a modern day waste land as a result of the destruction caused by World War I. Eliot used the allusions to show that death brings new beginnings and change, and love still flourishes.
T.S Eliot, widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern poetry, has written many great poems. Among the most well known of these are “The Waste Land, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which share similar messages, but are also quite different. In both poems, Eliot uses various poetic techniques to convey themes of repression, alienation, and a general breakdown in western society. Some of the best techniques to examine are ones such as theme, structure, imagery and language, which all figure prominently in his poetry. These techniques in particular are used by Eliot to both enhance and support the purpose of his poems.
Modernism in T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" Modernism has been defined as a rejection of traditional 19th-century norms, whereby artists, architects, poets and thinkers either altered or abandoned earlier conventions in an attempt to re-envision a society in flux. In literature this included a progression from objectivist optimism to cynical relativism expressed through fragmented free verse containing complex, and often contradictory, allusions, multiple points of view and other poetic devices that broke from the forms in Victorian and Romantic writing, as can be seen in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (Levanson). The varied perspectives or lack of a central, continuous speaker uproots "The Waste Land" from previous forms of poetry; however, it is not simply for the sake of being avant-garde, but to espouse the modernist philosophy, which posits the absence of an Absolute and requires the interpretation of juxtaposed, irreconcilable points of view in order to find meaning. The first stanza illustrates this point. Within the first seven lines, the reader is presented with a "normal" poem that conforms to an ordered rhyme and meter.