Introduction to The Waste Land

1
Introduction to The Waste Land
2
Outline

• - T.S.Eliot
• - Modernism
• - About the Waste Land
• - Summary
• - Themes
• - Allusions

3
T.S Eliot

• - Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis,
• Missouri, of New England stock. He Entered
• Harvard in the year of 1906.
• - His poetry first appeared in 1915 , and his
  first
• published 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 .

4
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)

5
Stylistic characteristics

• - Free indirect speech
• - Juxtaposition of characters
• - Allusions
• - Intertextuality
• - Satire
• - Irony
• - Symbolism
• - Discontinuous narrative
• - Paradoxes
• - Figures of speech

6
The Waste Land

• It was published in 1922
• It consists of 434 lines arranged into V
  sections
• 1 - The Burial of the Dead
• 2 - A Game of Chess
• 3 - The Fire Sermon
• 4 - Death by Water
• 5 - What the Thunder Said
• Detailed notes were are added.

7
Summary

• Stanza 1
• - The poem begins with description
• of 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

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• 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 and
• the one-eyed man.
• - She cant 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.

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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 .

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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 .

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Allusions

• 1- The title The Waste Land
• - Its 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
• - Its 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.

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• 3- stanza 3 Belladona, the Lady o f the Rocks
• - It refers to Leonardo Da Vincis Madonna of
  the Rocks
• 4- stanza 3 I see crowds of people, walking
  round in a rings- It refers to Dantes Inferno
  an epic that tells Dantes journey to hell.-
  Those people are the damned in Dantes Inferno
  who are imprisoned in various circles of hell.