Introduction to The Waste Land

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 EnteredHarvard in the year of 1906.

-His poetry first appeared in 1915 , and his firstpublished 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 LandIt was published in 1922It consists of 434 lines arranged into V

sections :1 - The Burial of the Dead

2 - A Game of Chess3 - The Fire Sermon

4 - Death by Water5 - What the Thunder Said

Detailed notes were are added.

SummaryStanza 1:

-The poem begins with descriptionof 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 andthe 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:

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 globe-trotter symbolizes of the rootlessness of the modern man.

-She, entirely, lived her life on the physical level. 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 mainly on the physical aspect.

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.

Allusions1 -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.