T.S Eliot was a famous British poet affluent for his modernist views on society. He was deemed “one of the twentieth century’s major poets” . In 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in the Criterion, a famous British magazine. The Waste Land is a multifaceted poem which discusses the difficulties of moral and cultural aftershocks of World War I. Eliot portrays his view of modern society with the poem that exemplifies themes of futility and alienation. The poems use of ‘waste’ does not represent the aftermath of war but rather the “emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man” .
This pattern is easily found in every aspect of the poem. The Waste Land itself is divided into four sections, so by glancing over the poem, a reader sees that the whole is already broken into smaller pieces. An example of this deliberate fragmentation is found in the third section of the poem, “The Fire Sermon.” Eliot writes, “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
Dear Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot. I find your poem “The Waste Land” very intriguing. However I can also find it troublesome to understand and that is why I have decided to write this letter to you. I want to share my ideas with you and see if I have interpreted your poem in the best way possible. The title of your poem is “The Waste Land”.
Loss of work was an obvious struggle during the Great Depression and no doubt one the ‘Forgotten Man’ faced but the piece goes beyond surface. Man lost sense of community, motivation, and hope. The Depression may have caused citizens and the government to pull together in desperate need of support and comradery but that did not happen overnight. This piece shows a man, who is clearly not a hobo as he is dressed well and clean, being overlooked or as Dixon put it, forgotten. The frightful level of uncertainty the generation faced is unimaginable but they needed to remember they were not alone.
In the first few lines Eliot uses imagery to describe what the Waste Land looks like. “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory
On the chance that one is born in to a world of godless gloom, without religion and no path to salvation, a bleak and heavy hopelessness is bound to be engrained in the way of the land. T.S. Eliot paints a picture of a woeful world of despair where the “hollow men” live solely with religious reverie and of salvation in slumber. By joining literary methods of imagery, tone, and diction in his poem, “The Hollow Men,” the hopelessness is visible all over the whole poem, and is established as the poem’s theme with the utilization of the previously mentioned literary techniques. First, T.S.
Hemingway presents the elements of failure and suffering in The Old Man and the Sea by depicting several instances of suffering and failure which the Old Man, Santiago, has to go through throughout the course of the novel. According to Hemingway, life is just one big struggle. In the beginning of the novel itself, The Old Man, is presented as a somewhat frail old man who is still struggling with his life as well as his past failures. His skiff even had a sail which bore great resemblance to “the flag of permanent defeat”, with its multiple patches all over. Throughout the novel, scenes of suffering and failure are shown several times, since the events of the novel depict the Old Man, Santiago, suffering on his boat with the real possibility
T.S. Eliot was born in 1888; he was an essayist, poet, literary and social critic and is viewed as one of the greatest modernist writers of his time. His poem, “The Wasteland” is considered to be one of the most important modernist poems of the twentieth century and reflects the supposedly fragile psychological state of humanity in this time. Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” during an era in human history that was unlike any other that had come before. World War 1, also known as the Great War was one of the most devastating human catastrophes that the world had ever seen.
but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses---not dulled them.” (Poe,1843). This gives me the sense that he is not in the right state of mind when we killed the old man. Furthermore he was just irritated over the fact that the old man's eye was different. The significance of the main character being a delusional mad man is that it's the reason why he killed the old man.
In this stanza, he alludes to the famous London Bridge and to that of Joseph Conrad’s 1987 story Karain: a memory. A story very much related to this stanza, about the European arms smugglers to Karain, a warlord in Southern Philippines who tells the Europeans a ghost story where the story ends with the Europeans in the busy street of London contemplating about the ghost story told by the warlord, Yes; I see it’. (Literary Genius, 2013) With no regular rhyme scheme, in all short narrative sections of The Waste Land, it is very much like that of free verse. Mentioned before, with the motion of individualism and opposing the social norms of poetry free verse writing was becoming relatively popular and hence why Eliot’s The Waste Land written during the modern era defied the common logic of poetry and became such a profound work of