Eng426 20th century english literature

OBJECTIVES

At the end of this unit, you should be able to:

• 
  summarise “The Wasteland”
  
• 
  discuss the themes and the techniques of T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland
  

3.0 MAIN CONTENT

3.1 T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)
T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis Missouri and he is arguably the most influential poet of the 20th century. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and Harvard but he could not finish his studies in Harvard due to the First World War. His works are much influenced by the poetry of Dante, John Donne and John Webster. T.S. Eliot was seen as a highly intellectual and difficult poet. He was a playwright, literary critic and poet.He is believed to have transformed how poetry was being written and understood. “The Wasteland” published in 1922 was seen as the longest poem in English language. T.S. Eliot published “Four Quartets” in 1943. His works are experimental in style and diction. In his poems, Eliot depicts ugly realities of urban life and decline of Western civilization using fragmentary images. In most of the poems Eliot wrote after 1927 when he joined the Church of England, he often stressed belief in spiritual comfort. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

2. T.S.Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

“The Wasteland” has five sections, “The Burial of the Dead”, “A Game of Chess”, “The Fire Sermon”, “Death By Water”, and “What the Thunder Said”. This analysis will only dwell on the first section “The Burial of the Dead”. “The Wasteland” is about spiritual dryness or poverty. There is futility in attempts to bring back relief and value to human life especially his day to day activities. In the poem, Eliot dwells on myth and other religious and spiritual material to show that religion is able to help man in the chaos of modern life that is marked with alienation and emptiness. “The Wasteland” is about the difference between different kinds of life and death. In “The Burial of the Dead” the poet persona talks about the attractiveness of death and how difficult it is for people to come back from the experience of death that marks the life of the people in wasteland. Men live in a dream world and are afraid to face reality.

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.
Though April is the sweet month of rebirth, it is the most joyful season but it is the cruellest, it brings hope to the wasteland and it mocks the people there because it reminds them of what they had before and the need to have it back. The people do not wish to have a new life; they prefer the winter that makes them seek forgetfulness, a season that does not call for activity or action. They detest the rain that April brings though it brings new life and regeneration.
In the second section of “The Burial of the Dead”, the poet persona talks again about the rootlessness, desolation and futility in modern life.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief And the dry stone no sound of water.

There is barrenness and spiritual death in modern civilization. The modern soul finds no relief or comfort in his environment. There is biblical allusion in the above lines from the book of Ezekiel, Isaiah and Ecclesiastes.

In the third section of “The Burial of the Dead”, the poem shows that the height of joy, fulfilment or meaning in life is like death. This section is about a young and beautiful hyacinth girl who has been forgotten by her lover. The following commentary is instructive of the reason behind Eliot’s difficult style in “The Waste Land”:
Eliot’s poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem’s writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century. (http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section2.rhtml)

2.