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Multiple Voices In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

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The Waste Land has frequently been read as poem of many voices. Compare and contrast the ways that T.S. Eliot uses multiple voices in the poem. Your answer should pay particular attention to literary techniques and mention ideas relating to intertextuality/citation. After the First World War a generation of men returned home with distorted views of life, questioning their purpose and existence in this world. The Waste Land offers no consolation to those searching for answers, instead it cements the absence of spirituality and religion in the modern world, and extinguishes any glimmer of prospect in the afterlife. While it appears that Eliot directly addresses this lost generation of aimless men, desperately searching for reassurance or even support in their beliefs, Eliot maintained his high expectations of readers. The Waste Land, upon first reading, can be a perplexing and obscure …show more content…

Eliot’s use of literary techniques aid in creating a morbid world where aimless, hopeless people live without a purpose. However, it is the intertextuality in the epigraph of the poem that is truly significant as it prepares the reader for this desolate land and the belief that there is prospect in death. This prospect is not due to an afterlife, but because death will end the continuous suffering of all those living in The Waste

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