T.S Eliot - The Wasteland

T.S Eliot - The Wasteland

1. 1922

2. Simultaneously fractured and incoherent

3. Addresses fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture

4. General crisis of western culture

5. Seeking redemption in the cultural past

   • Looking back and remembering a time when European culture was whole and operative
     • Nostalgia

6. Major statement of modernist poetics

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7. 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

8. 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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9. Themes

   • Infidelity
   • Changing nature of gender roles
   • Fragmentation of the psyche of humanity
   • Literary history

10. 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

11. 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

12. Broken voices that are not quite coherent