Myths In The Waste Land Analysis

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Abstract
Myths are new additions to the diversified literary devices in use such as metaphor ,imagery and symbol .Myth is very clear .Besides working as a literary devices ,it also works as a tool to conduct order, as Eliot says ,”to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history “.It does so by being omnipresent in time and place ,by connecting the past ,present and future in a unite and by being universal because of its bond to the complex psychic tendency inherited by human beings .It is a part of the unconscious psychic of man which design itself into the conscious by means of ,what Jung calls ,”motifs”, “primordial images “.
Writer’s interest in a literary use of words has taken him to the new …show more content…

He believe that it was un productive for romantic poets to appeal to their emotions and to be simple in revealing the evil aspects of modern society. It would be more direct to use mythical stories and allusions to hold out the consciousness of the modern society and each individual as well. It bring out the comparison between past and present, so that modern man could see that the present is a continuation of the past.

Myths In The Waste Land

T.S.Eliot uses different myths in The Waste Land to suggest the collective unconsciousness of the western readers or those readers who have the knowledge of the western culture and norms. It is the comprehensive aim of “The Waste Land” to make essential dependence on a substitute of myths.

In the review of James Joysses’s Ulysses in ‘The dial’, November, 1923, Eliot wrote ;
“I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found ………..In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,…………………. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history …………..instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical …show more content…

(…)”.
The Holy Grail: Myth of Quest
Quest has been a great subject of romantic past stories .It is starting from the ‘Greek Hellenic’ time through the medieval time to the modern age. Quest according to Canadian critic Northrop Fry, belongs to the literary category of romance that makes one of the four theory of myths .Taking mythical stories in his works, he identify the resemblance between literary work and the natural rhythm and then he found the theory of four myths, namely, the myth of spring :comedy; the myth of summer: romance; the myth of autumn: tragedy; the myth of winter: irony and satire.
Romance, to fry, is “nearest of all literary forms to the wish- fulfillment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideas in some form of romance……….(Fry, 1973:186).so major adventure in a romance is called the

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