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Many critics (people who read and talk about poems) think "The Waste Land" is more a poem about "aesthetics" than anything else. They think that Eliot (the author) wanted to make his readers feel something when they read the poem, instead of know something after they read it.
A dramatic monologue that changes speakers, locations, and times throughout, "The Waste Land" draws on a dizzying array of literary, musical, historical, and popular cultural allusions in order to present the terror, futility, and alienation of modern life in the wake of World War I.
- Female
- Poetry Analyst
- I. The Burial of the Dead. April is the cruellest month, breeding. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring. Dull roots with spring rain.
- II. A GAME OF CHESS. The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass. (…) Spread out in fiery points.
- III. THE FIRE SERMON. The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf. Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind. (…) But at my back in a cold blast I hear.
- IV. DEATH BY WATER. Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell. And the profit and loss.
The Waste Land is often interpreted as a bleak poem which sounds a note of despair about the state of the modern world. Certainly as the last dozen or so lines suggest, all that remains of civilisation is so many quotations and snippets from great works of literature: Dante, Thomas Kyd, Gerard de Nerval, the Upanishads.
Jul 4, 2020 · Eliot’s The Waste Land is undoubtedly the most renowned if not notorious literary achievement in poetry in English of the 20th century, a poem so celebrated even in its own time that it generated a whole slew of legends, misinformation, and general myths about its origins, intentions, and impact on the contemporary scene of postwar Europe in ...
The Waste Land offers a profound reflection on the barrenness of modern life. In Eliot’s imagining, World War I had irreparably damaged Western civilization, reducing it to a smoking ruin.
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Much of this final section of the poem is about a desire for water: the waste land is a land of drought where little will grow. Water is needed to restore life to the earth, to return a sterile land to fertility. (Shades of the Fisher King myth here again.)
