Introduction to The Waste Land
Outline
- T.S.Eliot
- Modernism
- About the Waste Land
- Summary
- Themes
- Allusions
T.S Eliot :
- Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis,
Missouri, of New England stock. He Entered
Harvard in the year of 1906.
- His poetry first appeared in 1915 , and his first
published collection of poems was "Prufrock“
and "Other Observations " in 1917 . The Waste Land appeared in 1922.
- He was affected by the clear and precise images of the imagists, and
the suggestive images of the French symbolists and the the
combination of wit and passion of the metaphysical poets.
- He learned from Ezra Pound to fear the romantic softness and to
regard the poetic medium rather than the poetic personality .
Modernism
“Our civilization comprehends great variety
and complexity, and this variety and complexity,
playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce
various and complex results.
The poet must become more and more
comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in
order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning.”
(The Metaphysical Poets: 1921)
Stylistic characteristics:
- Free indirect speech
- Juxtaposition of characters
- Allusions
- Intertextuality
- Satire
- Irony
- Symbolism
- Discontinuous narrative
- Paradoxes
- Figures of speech
The Waste Land
It was published in 1922
It consists of 434 lines arranged into V sections:
1 - The Burial of the Dead
2 - A Game of Chess
3 - The Fire Sermon
4 - Death by Water
5 - What the Thunder Said
Detailed notes were are added.
Summary
Stanza 1:
- The poem begins with description
of the seasons.
- Then, moves from talking about nature to a personal
experience.
Stanza 2:
- There is a dialogue between son of man and a divine
power.
- He tries to search for signs of life, but finds only
broken images and dead trees.
- He moves to another personal account, and the
narrator becomes the hyacinth girl
Stanza 3:
- Madam Sosostris, a fortune teller,
is introduced.
- She displays the cards of a drowned
sailor, Belladona; the lady of the rocks
the man with the 3 staves, the wheel and
the one-eyed man.
- She can’t find the hanged man among the cards, so she
concludes that he should fear death by water.
- She sees a vision of people walking in a ring.
Stanza 4:
- It begins with the image of unreal city, a crowd of people
flows over the London bridge.
- He sees “Stetson” with whom he fought in a war and asks
him about a corpse that he planted last year.
Themes:
1- Disillusionment:
- The human society is
so disillusioned that it has undergone a moral
death of the modern society after the World War
I.
I.A. Richards says: The Waste Land is “a vision of
dissolution and spiritual drought; the plight of
the whole generation” .
The disillusionment of the modern civilization is
due to several causes:
1- Sexual perversion
2- Loss of faith and moral values
3- Politics and war
2- Contemporary Rootlessness:
- The German princess called Marie who is a
globe-trotter symbolizes of the rootlessness of
the modern man.
- She, entirely, lived her life on the physical level.
She did not remember her parents, brothers
or sisters but only her cousin with whom she
had a relationship.
Eliot considers such ties necessary for culture,
real life and morals.
Marie is a representation of the modern
humanity which lives mainly on the physical
aspect.
3- Guilty Love:
- We are introduced to the story of a German princess
who may be the Hyacinth girl recalling a moment of
passionate intensity in her youth . Eliot comments
on the sexual copulation in the waste land in which
sexual acts became sinful and beastly since it
divested all the spiritual important .
Frisch weht der wind
Der heimat zu.
Mein Irisch kind
Wo weilest du ?
This extract in the German language is from Wagner's
famous opera "Tristan and Isolde " which is a story
of guilt love .
Allusions
1- The title: The Waste Land
- It’s taken from a book called (From Ritual to
Romance) for Jessie L. Weston.
- It focuses on the Grail Legend and the Fisher King
whose infirmity affects the fertility of the
kingdom itself, and the land is doomed to
barrenness.
2- stanza 2: “Son of man”
- It’s from to the Hebrew Bible.
- Son of man is Ezekiel who was called by God to
warn Israel to repent upon their idolatry and to
prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem and the
enslavement of its people. Yet, an eventual
restoration will follow.
3- stanza 3: “Belladona, the
Lady o f the Rocks”
- It refers to Leonardo Da
Vinci’s “Madonna of the
Rocks”
4- stanza 3: “I see crowds
of people, walking round
in a rings”
- It refers to Dante’s
Inferno: an epic that tells
Dante’s journey to hell.
- Those people are the
damned in Dante’s Inferno
who are imprisoned in
various circles of hell.