Zusammenfassung der Ressource
T.S Eliot - The Wasteland
- 1922
- Simultaneously fractured and incoherent
- Addresses fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture
- General crisis of western culture
- Seeking redemption in the cultural past
- Looking back and remembering a time when European culture was whole and operative
- Nostalgia
- Major statement of modernist poetics
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- Stylistically
- Allusion
- A variety of verse forms
- Quotations in different languages
- Collage of poetic fragments
- Recalls the great forms of previous tradition
- Creates an impossible elegy and a modernist collage
- Broken free verse
- Secondary criticism
- I.A Richards
- Praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war 'sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations'
- Sandra M Gilbert
- Central theme: grief for lost male friend = poem elegiac in manner
- 'Those are pearls that were his eyes'
- Eliot as an 'impassioned witness' to the post-war devastation
- He is also a mourner, voicing the grief of the masses yet at the same time standing outside of their grief
- 'Crowds of people walking round in a ring'
- Because he is a mourner driven by the need for consolation characteristic of writers of elegies, the speaker deploys conventional features of the pastoral elegy
- The ironic discrepancy between nature's endurance as manifested in the returning spring and his own sense of mortal loss, 'April is the cruellest month, breeding...'
- World itself debilitated by the loss of his friend
- I had not thought death had undone so many'
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- Themes
- Infidelity
- Changing nature of gender roles
- Fragmentation of the psyche of
humanity
- Literary history
- Motifs
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- Fragmentation
- Demonstrates the fragmented human psyche
- Juxtapose literary texts against one another
- Barrage of sensory perceptions helps to recreate the sense of the shattered post-war human psyche
- Symbols
- Rats
- Water (Death by water repeated)
- haunted by literal body - Pearls that were his eyes
- Unreal city
- Paris, London
- London takes its place as another 'unreal city' in a line of doomed metropolises and collapsed civilisations
- 'Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal
- Athens, Rome (once great, now fallen)
- The decline of empire
- imperial context
- Broken voices that are not quite coherent