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Oct 12, 2022 · The Waste Land’s afterlife was a self-fulfilling prophecy strategically crafted by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, two writers who sought to meaningfully connect with what they thought of as the...
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The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.
- T. S. Eliot
- 1922
A comprehensive guide to T. S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, a dramatic monologue that explores the terror, futility, and alienation of modern life. Learn about the poem's themes, symbols, poetic devices, form, and context with LitCharts.
A study guide for T. S. Eliot's modernist poem The Waste Land, which depicts a spiritually degraded world after World War I. Learn about the poem's structure, themes, images, and sources from the epigraph to the end.
- Summary
- Detailed Analysis
- Historical Background
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It is difficult to tie one meaning to ‘The Waste Land‘. Ultimately, the poem itself is about culture: the celebration of culture, the death of culture, and the misery of being learned in a world that has largely forgotten its roots. Eliot wrote it as a eulogyto the culture that he considered to be dead; at a time when dancing, music, jazz, and othe...
Part One: Stanza One
Immediately, the poem starts with the recurring imagery of death: ‘April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.’ Note the cadence of every –ing ending to the sentence, giving it a breathless, uneven sort of reading: when one reads it, there is a quick-slow paceto it that invites the reader to linger over the words. The use of the word ‘winter’ provides an oxymoronic idea: the idea that cold and death c...
Stanza Two
Here is another of Eliot’s allusions, ‘son of man/ you cannot say or guess’, which is directly lifted from The Call of Ezekiel in the ‘Book of Ezekiel’. The religious allusion could be considered a response to the vast technological advancements of the time, where science was taking great leaps; however, the spiritual and cultural sectors of the world were desolate. ‘A heap of broken images’ shows the fragmented nature of the world and the snapshots of what the world has become to further pin...
Stanza Three
Cleanth Brooks writes: “The fortune-telling of “The Burial of the Dead” will illustrate the general method very satisfactorily. On the surface of the poem the poet reproduces the patter of the charlatan, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface irony: the contrast between the original use of the Tarot cards and the use made by Madame Sosostris. But each of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new meaning in the general context of the poem. The...
From the Modernism Lab at Yale University: “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” wrote Ezra Pound shortly after the poem was published in 1922. T.S. Eliot’s poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the first world war and from E...
A comprehensive analysis of the modernist masterpiece that explores the themes of death, religion, and culture in a fragmented and allusive style. Learn about the poem's structure, sources, symbols, and meanings with examples and references.
- Female
- Poetry Analyst
From The Waste Land (Boni & Liveright, 1922) by T.S. Eliot. This poem is in the public domain. The Waste Land - April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.
3 days ago · The Waste Land, long poem by T.S. Eliot, published in 1922, first in London in The Criterion (October), next in New York City in The Dial (November), and finally in book form, with footnotes by Eliot. The 433-line, five-part poem was dedicated to fellow poet Ezra Pound, who helped condense the original manuscript to nearly half its size.
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