The Waste Land

1
The Waste Land
2
Notes

• Shift from happy to sad
• Eliot and his times
• Post WW1
• un generation perdu (a lost generation)attrib
  . Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway
• Hemingway, Dos Passos, F.M. Ford, F. S.
  Fitzgerald, W. C. Williams, Eliot

3
The poem

• Note titleWaste Land, not Wasteland
• When love is absent, a waste land ensues
• what kinds of love?
• Look through each section how is love absent?
  What kind of love is absent?

4
Eliot on the poem

• Added notes to American publication
• Critics, intelligentsia kew this would be a big
  hit
• Reveals Eliots near-encyclopedic knowledge of
  literature, myth (especially Oriental mythology),
  languages (Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, others)
• Intentionally difficult (obscure)? Why?

5
Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Eliot)

• Varying opinions, from bete noir to misunderstood
  genius
• Film Tom and Viv (1994)
• Aizenberg, Muse