T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Melanie Czerwinski

Background

• Eliot was influenced by World War I, which impacted themes of the poem

• The poem is split into five sections – The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, and What the Thunder Said

• Does not follow epic poem

structure exactly, but for a purpose

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot

Plot

• No exact plot, unlike other epic poems

• The “waste land” is without water and is presented as barren, but people still live in it

http://www.ww1battlefields.co.uk/somme/newfoundland.html

Characters

• No main character

• Characters are presented in the poem mostly through vague conversations, and some are nameless

• Used to show what life in the waste land is like

• “Controversial” characters

Characters - Tiresias

• Speaker in The Fire Sermon

• Blind prophet that appears in Greek tragedies

• Hermaphrodite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiresias

Epic Elements – Begins in media res

• When the poem begins, the waste land itself is already established and is “under… brown fog” (Eliot, 1922, p. 2671)

• The poem begins after World War I, and focuses on the aftermath– However, it does not focus on a tale in this aftermath,

like other epic poems

http://www.ww1battlefields.co.uk/images/mud.jpg

Epic Elements – Vast Setting

• The Waste Land references Europe as a whole, with focuses on England (specifically London) and Germany

• Through the perspectives of different speakers, the reader can never be sure of where they are, making the setting feel even larger

Epic Elements – Mythology References

• Many epic poems reference mythology in a more direct way than The Waste Land– Mythological beings are present, are treated

as if they once existed, or are seen through divine intervention

• Tiresias is the only figure of mythology that is truly present

Epic Elements – Mythology References

• Eliot uses mythology as a means of symbolism• The Burial of the Dead

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

“They called me the hyacinth girl.”– Yet, when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth

garden

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.”

(Eliot, 1922, p. 2616)

Epic Elements – Mythology References

• Hyacinth was the “name of a young man loved and accidentally killed by Apollo in Greek mythology” (Greenblatt, 2006, p. 2616)

http://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyakinthos

Epic Elements – (Lack of) Epic Hero

• The Waste Land has no epic hero• Absence of a hero in the poem is just as

important as having a hero in a traditional epic poem– Shows lack of hope– Hero could not portray cultural values

because there are no values in the waste land– Hero could not descend because the waste

land is so disconnected

Deconstruction and Modernization

• Eliot neglecting or bending core elements of epic poetry is intentional

• Epics are an ancient genre of poetry

• Eliot, a modernist, took aspects of an epic and changed them to fit what he wanted to express

• More practical or realistic in comparison to traditional epics

Themes

• Sexuality– Tiresias – forms “bridge” between man and

woman– “Hyacinth girl”

• In Burial of the Dead• In the original text, the “hyacinth girl” was male

(Miller, 1998)“I rememberThe hyacinth garden. Those are

pearls that were his eyes, yes! “

Themes

• Damage to Society/Humanity– In context with World War I influences, the waste land

came to be because of human action– The waste land is an “unreal city, under… brown fog”

(Eliot, 1922, p. 2617)– Humans are forced to live in

the waste land, and

characters act detached

from their surroundings

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/world-war-i-battlefield-granger.html

Conclusion

• Eliot set to show the effects of World War I through a modern technique

• He took an old genre and “renewed” it to set it apart from the writing of other authors