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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.)
The Waste Land. Summary & Analysis. T. S. Eliot opens The Waste Land with an epigraph taken from a Latin novel by Petronius. The epigraph describes a woman with prophetic powers who has been blessed with long life, but who doesn’t stay eternally young.
The Waste Land offers a land that is not wholly waste: it is a land where things are growing, but they are growing amidst the waste and devastation caused by the war. Consider, too, the overly fertile Lil, the wife and mother from ‘A Game of Chess’, who has had five children already, and nearly died giving birth to her last.
‘The Waste Land‘ is considered defining poem of literary modernism as it employs experimentation in form while portraying the decadent contemporaneous time instead of Victorian idealism. ‘ The Waste Land ‘ has such vast and complex references that Eliot had to provide end notes to the poem.
The Waste Land is a modernist poem by T. S. Eliot that illuminates the devastating aftereffects of World War I. First published in 1922, the poem is considered by many to be Eliot’s...
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Two figures walk through a rocky and waterless waste land that stretches to a ragged line of mountains along a distant horizon. It is a post-apocalyptic world expanding to include all the capitals of more than a millennium of European civilization—Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London—a ruined world now deathly quiet save for the ...