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The Burial of the Dead. April is the cruellest month The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. He paints April as a month of restorative power, when spring rain brings nature back to life: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March ...
- Undead Eliot: How “The Waste Land” Sounds Now
The Waste Land was published in 1922, but by the forties,...
- T. S. Eliot
In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “...
- The Imaginative Man
In 1926, at the height of modernism’s golden age, a young...
- Cousin Nancy
Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them,...
- Aunt Helen
Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt, And lived in a small...
- The Canterbury Tales
Whan that Aprille with his shour e s soot e , The droghte of...
- The Boston Evening Transcript
The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the...
- Undead Eliot: How “The Waste Land” Sounds Now
Lines 215-256: In the Waste Land, sex is loveless and unfulfilling, not affectionate and restorative. In this section, a young man, “a small house agent’s clerk,” who works in the City pays a visit—in modern parlance a “booty call”—to a young woman, a secretary. Their sexual encounter is passionless and mechanical.
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line [ A ] poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial .
- T. S. Eliot
- 1922
Mar 5, 2023 · Originally Published: March 06, 2023. Share. August 1929: A man standing alone on a rain-drenched pavement on the River Thames Embankment, London. The initial declaration of The Waste Land —“April is the cruellest month”—is clear enough in meaning, even if it defies readers’ expectations. The opening is a subversion of the first lines ...
- Background of The Poem
- The Waste Land Summary
- Themes in The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
- The Waste Land Literary Analysis
Historical Background
After the First World War, the people of Europe were left disturbed and disillusioned. The beliefs and values around which their societies were based lost their authenticity. The people of Europe questioned them and considered them to be the cause of the horrific war they had faced. They tried to leave behind their past and move on. They were on a quest to build a new world. In this way, their connection with their history was utterly lost. They rejected all their beliefs, which they had held...
Literary Background
The Waste Land is perhaps the most important highlight of Eliot’s poetic career. It was written in the year 1922. It was the time of Modernism. Modernism was a movement in which artists and writers tried to find novel methods of observation, new methods of getting knowledge, and leaving behind every established rule. In literature, it was characterized by fragmentation in narration and abandonment of an objective viewpoint. The literary works also concerned existential themes like the purpose...
A mythical character Sibyl of Cumae, appears in the epigraph of the poem. The speaker says that when a group of young boys visited the Sibyl and asked her what she wanted, she replied that she wanted death. The rest of the poem is divided into five different sections which are as under:
Death
Death soars over the poem. The reader is led towards death in almost every paragraph of the poem. Death is not only physical death but is also spiritual and moral. The people of the modern world are breathing but are dead in this life of theirs. They have lost the essence of life. The Sibyl of Cumae appears at the start of the poem. She has been granted eternal life. However, she is fed up with this life and wants to die. Her life is full of miseries and has no joy to offer. The same is the c...
Loss of High Culture
Modern man does not have faith in the culture and traditions of his past. He does not want to revisit the past values, which resulted in a horrific war. The centers around which the society stood are no more acceptable to him. This theme recurs many times in the poem. There are many allusions to the works of the glorious past age, which contrast the gloom of the present against the joy of the past. The speaker laments how the high standards of European culture are lost, and the modern man has...
Rebirth
Throughout the poem, there are instances of resurrection and rebirth. The modern man has died a spiritual death. However, the speaker has hope that resurrection is coming close. Soon the lost generation will retain their lost values and attain normality. The image of Christ is strewn throughout the poem, which symbolizes resurrection and rebirth. The land described in the poem is barren and dry. There is no water to give birth to new life. Furthermore, Fisher King fishes desperately to regain...
The poem The Waste Land mourns the infertility of the modern world. It makes the modern man see what sort of damage he has done to the world. In the poem, there are bits and pieces of the beauties of the past, which are juxtaposed with the fragmented social structure of modern times. This way, it highlights the darkness of the modern world against ...
It is difficult to tie one meaning to ‘ The Waste Land ‘. Ultimately, the poem itself is about culture: the celebration of culture, the death of culture, and the misery of being learned in a world that has largely forgotten its roots. Eliot wrote it as a eulogy to the culture that he considered to be dead; at a time when dancing, music ...
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Jan 9, 2023 · Two years after the publication of The Waste Land, he said of “The Hollow Men” in 1924 that “I compose on the typewriter,” and repeated the phrase word for word to a poet in 1927, adding: “The nearest approach to a manuscript I ever have is the first draft with pencil corrections.”. That seemed an exact description for The Waste ...
