Introduction to The Waste Land
Hana Al Yaqubi
Amani Inshassi
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 in 5 parts:
1- The Burial of the Dead
2- A Game of Chess
3- The Fire Sermon
4- Death by Water
5- What the Thunder Said
- A detailed editorial comments are added to it
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 which are mentioned by Eliot in this
poem .These are :
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 globetrotter symbolizes of the rootlessness of the modern
man.
- She, entirely, lived her life on the physical plane. 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 on the physical plane.
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.