It was the hottest October in years. These days, the hotel is a block of flats, and while the shelter is still a shelter, it is at present fenced off. She asked him to remove some lines due to their being too personal, but many others about a husband and wife living with mental illness were retained. Yes, bad. The poem is notable for its unusual style, which fuses different poetic forms and traditions. Eliot also alludes to numerous works of literature including the Bible, Shakespeare, St Augustine, Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts, as well as French poetry, Wagnerian opera, and Arthurian legend surrounding the Holy Grail.
But the poem is also strikingly modern in its references to jazz music, gramophones, motorcars, typists and tinned food. It continues to divide readers, but its reputation as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century is secure. Perhaps revealingly, Eliot completed the poem while recovering from a nervous breakdown. We have analysed the famous opening line of the poem in more detail here. The presumably male speaker who answers her seems to have lost all grip on reality when confronted with the woman coming out of the garden with her arms full of flowers and her hair wet.
Then we have a section involving Tarot cards, used to foretell the future, which are dealt out by the clairvoyante, Madame Sosostris. This first part of The Waste Land ends with a male speaker meeting Stetson, whom he fought alongside in the Battle of Mylae one of the Punic Wars of ancient times. He asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden has begun to sprout, returning us to the imagery from the beginning of the poem. The chief focus of this section is two scenes involving women: the first an upper-class woman and the second a lower-class one.
There is a suggestion that they are both trying to cope with husbands who have served in the recent war, but are also dealing with their own issues, too. Then we have a conversation between her and we infer her husband, where they fail to communicate meaningfully with each other, partly because the woman is nervous and jittery, and because there is a suggestion that the man is suffering from shell-shock or PTSD.
From this scene, we move to a pub in the East End of London, where a working-class woman, Lou, is talking to Bill and some of her other friends about her friend Lil, whose husband Albert has come back from the war, wanting to have sex with his wife again.
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. Along the way, in ll. Shades of the Gothic are introduced here, which are echoed by the bats with the baby faces in the chapel. Can one remain spiritually pure and focused, or will the lure of the body become too strong?
This section — and the poem — ends with the arrival of rain in a thunderstorm, where the DA sound of the thunderclap is interpreted in light of the Hindu Upanishads. Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Born in St Louis, Missouri in , Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London.
Although his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations , sold modestly its print run of copies would take five years to sell out , the publication of The Waste Land in , with its picture of a post-war Europe in spiritual crisis, established him as one of the most important literary figures of his day. He never returned to America except to visit as a lecturer , but became an official British citizen in , the same year he was confirmed into the Church of England.
His last major achievement as a poet was Four Quartets , which reflect his turn to Anglicanism. In his later years he attempted to reform English verse drama with plays like Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party He died in London in Eliot himself did not much like free verse in general and even insisted that it did not exist.
It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse. Indeed, their views had converged in the years immediately preceding The Waste Land , with Pound experimenting more with traditional meters and Eliot using some aspects of free verse.
At first glance, The Waste Land may appear to follow no set metrical pattern. Yet, just as the opening lines of the poem subtly introduce a form of rhyme, Eliot frequently draws on regular meters. Here, the first two lines seem to be made up entirely of stressed syllables, although they tend to fall into groups of three.
The third and fourth lines, however, are composed of iambs. Many verses of The Waste Land are composed in iambic pentameter, and others closely resemble that meter. Porter in the spring. In the encounter related in the poem, neither participant seems to experience much pleasure.
Eliot uses quatrains rhyming units of four lines to describe the tryst. When he has left,. The double or feminine rhymes rhyming the last two syllables of each line have a darkly comic effect.
The traditional meter and rhyme in such passages sets them off from the free verse of the rest of the poem, but often Eliot seems to be using the meter to call attention to a disjuncture between his low subject matter and the formal style with which he describes it.
In fact, often the formality of the language is inversely related to the seriousness of the material Eliot is describing. Frequently, the lower-class material in the poem is treated satirically, in contrast with the work of Joyce, who showed a great fondness for the lower middle-class milieu of Ulysses.
Eliot also makes use of a number of the patterns and systems for making meaning available to free verse, some of which have been summarized by the critic Paul Fussell. They include the use of enumeration or cataloguing. In this case, Eliot begins in iambic hexameter six feet , but allows the meter to break down in the third quoted line.
Another method of structuring free verse, seldom used by Eliot, is to write very long lines, each of which contains a full syntactic unit, as Whitman often does, thus creating the effect of a formal speech and sometimes even a Biblical tone. Eliot sometimes combines the techniques of Whitman and Williams, by writing a long line that introduces a set of variations on a theme; the line then re-appears but broken up by enjambment as if the speaker were mulling over his thought, unable to phrase it adequately.
If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water.
The Waste Land thus makes use of a wide range of metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, as well as techniques for structuring free verse. The Waste Land is also characteristic of modernist poetry in that it contains both lyric and epic elements. Modernism continued the tendency, begun in romanticism, to prize lyric highly, but many modernist poets also sought to write in the traditionally highest form, epic. Yet its broader ambitions are obvious.
Instead, their epics tended to treat historical experience as fragmentary, and often it is difficult to say whether their long poems are epics or merely collections of lyrics.
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