Name:Poojaba S.Gohil
Class: M.A. Sem. 3
Paper no.: 8
Topic: Reflection of the modern age in The Waste Land
Submitted to: Smt.S.B. Gardi
Department of English
M.K. Bhavnagar University
Class: M.A. Sem. 3
Paper no.: 8
Topic: Reflection of the modern age in The Waste Land
Submitted to: Smt.S.B. Gardi
Department of English
M.K. Bhavnagar University
Introduction of T. S. Eliot:
Born - 26th September, 1888
Died - 4th January 1965
T. S. Eliot is one of the major poets of the Modern age in English literature.He has written greatest poems in the twentieth century. His influence has been very great on English poetry.He uses the different language like effectively to communicate the predicament of modern world and modern man. The waste land is considered one of the most important poetic documents of the age. It expresses poignantly a desperate sense of the poet, and the age’s lack of positive spiritual thinking.
Born - 26th September, 1888
Died - 4th January 1965
T. S. Eliot is one of the major poets of the Modern age in English literature.He has written greatest poems in the twentieth century. His influence has been very great on English poetry.He uses the different language like effectively to communicate the predicament of modern world and modern man. The waste land is considered one of the most important poetic documents of the age. It expresses poignantly a desperate sense of the poet, and the age’s lack of positive spiritual thinking.
Introduction:
The Modern Age
The modern age is very different from the other ages in English Literature. The modern age is known as “Modernist Movement” in English Literature. The period of modern age is 1915 to 1945 and this age is totally different from the Victorian age.
The people of modern age reject old forms and trying to do a new technique and new style. Even in literature also many of the poet and writer wants to do different and bring something new in their writing.
The term “Modern” is generally known as an adjective expressing the state of being contemporary or possessing the qualities of current style. In art and culture, however, the terms modern and modernism pertain to the beliefs and philosophy of the society during the late 19th to the early 20th century. Because the concept has two different accepted meaning,
The Modern Age
The modern age is very different from the other ages in English Literature. The modern age is known as “Modernist Movement” in English Literature. The period of modern age is 1915 to 1945 and this age is totally different from the Victorian age.
The people of modern age reject old forms and trying to do a new technique and new style. Even in literature also many of the poet and writer wants to do different and bring something new in their writing.
The term “Modern” is generally known as an adjective expressing the state of being contemporary or possessing the qualities of current style. In art and culture, however, the terms modern and modernism pertain to the beliefs and philosophy of the society during the late 19th to the early 20th century. Because the concept has two different accepted meaning,
“The Modern Age a period of sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtue, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged”.
Introduction
The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist poetics, both for its broad symbolic significance and for Eliot’s masterful use of formal techniques that earlier modernists had only begun to attempt. The critic I. A. Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed.” Eliot later complained that “approving critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” Nonetheless, it was as a representative of a postwar generation that Eliot became famous. To compare Eliot’s comments on the poem with the way it was received illustrates strikingly the fact that, as William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put it, “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.” The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential statement of that crisis and the epitome of a modernist poem.
Eliot’s age itself was symbolic of an entry into mid-life. It was at 33, “in the middle of our life’s way,” that Dante had the vision of heaven and hell recorded in his Divine Comedy. It was at the same age that Christ was crucified. His death and resurrection form a major symbolic framework for The Waste Land. Although its first lines suggest an aversion to “mixing / Memory with desire” and to “stirring / Dull roots with spring rain,” the poem’s success results largely from Eliot’s ability to mix modes and tones. The originality of The Waste Land, and its importance for most poetry in English since 1922, lies in Eliot’s ability to meld a deep awareness of literary tradition with the experimentalism of free verse, to fuse private and public meanings, and to combine moments of lyric intensity into a poem of epic scope.
Eliot’s use of allusion and quotation seems in part a response to the dilemma of coming at the end of a great tradition. The poet seeks to address modern problems—the war, industrialization, abortion, urban life—and at the same time to participate in a literary tradition. His own imagination resembles the decaying land that is the subject of the poem: nothing seems to take root among the stony rubbish left behind by old poems and scraps of popular culture. The method of assembling “fragments” or “broken images” from the past into a sort of mosaic allows him at once to suggest parallels between contemporary problems and earlier historical situations and to disorient the reader, turning the reading process into a model of modern, urban confusion. It parallels the cubist use of collage, calling attention to the linguistic texture of the poem itself and to the materials—literary and popular—out of which it is constructed. Eliot’s allusive method is a distinctive feature of his poetry, but he developed it in part on the model of some of Pound’s earlier poems, and Pound’s editing of The Waste Land greatly increased its fragmentation. An even more important influence was Joyce. Eliot read the early episodes of Ulyssesthat appeared in the Little Review; as assistant editor at The Egoist, he read the original drafts of five episodes that were published there in 1919. He also read other parts of the novel in manuscript and corresponded with Joyce about it. He later confessed to having felt that Joyce’s Ulysses did “superbly” what Eliot himself was “tentatively attempting to do, with the usual false starts and despairs.” Allusion would become a favorite modernist technique for reconciling formal experiment with an awareness of literary tradition.
The land is cursed because people killed Son of Man and hanged him. So, it’s cursed on the land. People are not happy. Darkness, decay, fragmentation and death are because of that cursed.
‘‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gas house
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.’’
Second thing is about Fisher king. Fisher king was responsible for the barrenness of the land.
In short we cannot say that definitely that whether people are or land itself is responsible for wasteland. Because both are interwoven. Both are responsible for each other.
Some other examples of fragmentation and non-linear also find out in the poem. The waste land itself, a fragment open to interpretation. The waste land seems to lack coherence because of its fragmentation. All the images are broken, not well organized that’s why it’s look like fragmented images/poem.
‘‘Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight May. Goodnight.
Ta ta Goodnight. Goodnight.
Goodnight, Ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.’’
‘‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.’’
These lines not goes into linear way rather these are remain uncompleted, abstract or in fragment way. These lines indicates the life of modern people. They think in a fragment way. They speak in a fragment way. They lived life in a fragment way. This is the reason of fragmentation of culture which is leads towards despair, nothingness, and hopelessness.
Eliot’s use of allusion and quotation seems in part a response to the dilemma of coming at the end of a great tradition. The poet seeks to address modern problems—the war, industrialization, abortion, urban life—and at the same time to participate in a literary tradition. His own imagination resembles the decaying land that is the subject of the poem: nothing seems to take root among the stony rubbish left behind by old poems and scraps of popular culture. The method of assembling “fragments” or “broken images” from the past into a sort of mosaic allows him at once to suggest parallels between contemporary problems and earlier historical situations and to disorient the reader, turning the reading process into a model of modern, urban confusion. It parallels the cubist use of collage, calling attention to the linguistic texture of the poem itself and to the materials—literary and popular—out of which it is constructed. Eliot’s allusive method is a distinctive feature of his poetry, but he developed it in part on the model of some of Pound’s earlier poems, and Pound’s editing of The Waste Land greatly increased its fragmentation. An even more important influence was Joyce. Eliot read the early episodes of Ulyssesthat appeared in the Little Review; as assistant editor at The Egoist, he read the original drafts of five episodes that were published there in 1919. He also read other parts of the novel in manuscript and corresponded with Joyce about it. He later confessed to having felt that Joyce’s Ulysses did “superbly” what Eliot himself was “tentatively attempting to do, with the usual false starts and despairs.” Allusion would become a favorite modernist technique for reconciling formal experiment with an awareness of literary tradition.
The land is cursed because people killed Son of Man and hanged him. So, it’s cursed on the land. People are not happy. Darkness, decay, fragmentation and death are because of that cursed.
‘‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gas house
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.’’
Second thing is about Fisher king. Fisher king was responsible for the barrenness of the land.
In short we cannot say that definitely that whether people are or land itself is responsible for wasteland. Because both are interwoven. Both are responsible for each other.
Some other examples of fragmentation and non-linear also find out in the poem. The waste land itself, a fragment open to interpretation. The waste land seems to lack coherence because of its fragmentation. All the images are broken, not well organized that’s why it’s look like fragmented images/poem.
‘‘Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight May. Goodnight.
Ta ta Goodnight. Goodnight.
Goodnight, Ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.’’
‘‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.’’
These lines not goes into linear way rather these are remain uncompleted, abstract or in fragment way. These lines indicates the life of modern people. They think in a fragment way. They speak in a fragment way. They lived life in a fragment way. This is the reason of fragmentation of culture which is leads towards despair, nothingness, and hopelessness.
Conclusion:
In short the waste land at every angle reflected as a modern poem. Poem is feather on the hat of modern literature and also of modern people. But the poem has its own pros and cons. Pros in the sense it is gave the direction to the people. And cons in the sense that poem first announced as a depersonalizing of the poet but later on the secret was revealed that poem is totally depends on poet’s own experiences. Poet and his personal life fully reflected in the poem. Though it’s not the life of only T.S.Eliot instead of that it is reflected all the life of modern people.
The waste land considered as a modern epic of the English literature. The best example of modernist literature is T. S. Eliot’s “The waste land”. Throughout this poem Eliot shows us the real image of culture and society after the World War 1 and 2.
This poem depicts an image of the modern world through the perspective of a man finding himself hopeless and confused about the condition of the society.
“The waste land illustrates the contemporary waste land as a metaphor of modern Europe.”
Eliot’s the waste land is very hard to describe and analysis because this poem mainly deals with the idea of modern age and its new technique. In this poem the waste land there are so many features and influence of the modern age, and we can apply some of the characteristics of the modern age in this poem the waste land.
The modern age is the most complex, complicated and revolutionary age in the history of the world. The people of this age challenges everything like,
The Modern Age
T. S. Eliot said that modernist literature is….
“…. A way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history….instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art”
Characteristics of the modernist literature in the waste land:
oThe waste land made a tremendous impact on the post war generation, and is considered one of the most important documents of the modern age.
oThe poem is difficult to understand in detail, but its general aim is clear. Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, it presents modern London as an arid, waste land.
oThe poem is built round the symbols of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth, and this fundamental idea is referred to throughout. Other symbol in the poem are, however, not capable of precise explanation.
oIn a series of disconcertingly vivid impression, the poem progress by rather abrupt transition through five movements.
The waste land considered as a modern epic of the English literature. The best example of modernist literature is T. S. Eliot’s “The waste land”. Throughout this poem Eliot shows us the real image of culture and society after the World War 1 and 2.
This poem depicts an image of the modern world through the perspective of a man finding himself hopeless and confused about the condition of the society.
“The waste land illustrates the contemporary waste land as a metaphor of modern Europe.”
Eliot’s the waste land is very hard to describe and analysis because this poem mainly deals with the idea of modern age and its new technique. In this poem the waste land there are so many features and influence of the modern age, and we can apply some of the characteristics of the modern age in this poem the waste land.
The modern age is the most complex, complicated and revolutionary age in the history of the world. The people of this age challenges everything like,
The Modern Age
T. S. Eliot said that modernist literature is….
“…. A way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history….instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art”
Characteristics of the modernist literature in the waste land:
oThe waste land made a tremendous impact on the post war generation, and is considered one of the most important documents of the modern age.
oThe poem is difficult to understand in detail, but its general aim is clear. Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, it presents modern London as an arid, waste land.
oThe poem is built round the symbols of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth, and this fundamental idea is referred to throughout. Other symbol in the poem are, however, not capable of precise explanation.
oIn a series of disconcertingly vivid impression, the poem progress by rather abrupt transition through five movements.
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