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Thursday, March 14, 2019

T.S. Eliots The Wasteland Essay -- Eliot Wasteland Essays

T.S. Eliots The thievelandTraditionally, authors begin their compositions at the beginning and therefore uphold to an end, creating a logical flow of information towards a induction. T.S. Eliot threw most tralatitious form out the window as he composed The Waste Land. The voice changes, the structure varies, his allusions argon elusive, and the first section of the poem is authorize The Burial of The Dead. This of course does not speak to a beginning, but to the conclusion of what could be superstar or many lives. Even before this heading, the epigraph evokes the view of something, (a something that the reader must work to comprehend) almost eternal, reflecting on a life history (an almost eternal lifetime) with a melancholic eye. The reader of the poem begins with reflections on a life, a universal life, and with this understanding we can begin to get out some of the images and make sense of the major themes of the poem. Without reading the entire poem, one can n ot hope to catch the significance of the initial transit or the epigraph conversely, one might not comprehend the poem as a cohesive unit without its opening lines. Unlike Eliot, let us start with the genesis of the poem The Burial of The Dead. A major difficulty of this poem is its apparent lack of a single speaker. If there is an identifiable or specific speaker, they are contained within a few lines and then disappear into the background of the poem. The first seven lines are second or third person, singular or plural is not made clear. We are not given any perspective for these lines therefore, the reader has nothing with which to sharpen himself. The vertigo continues once the language is taken into consideration. What do we make of his confl... ...events from antediluvian to present, coming together in one piece to produce a single feeling. Eliot sums up this feeling with the title. At once everything is connected by the poem and yet disconnected by time, place , and experience. I mentioned that the poems epigraph implied a reflection on an almost eternal life, The Sibyl (as well as Tiresias later in the poem) mirrors civilizations history and the poem itself. Where Sibyl entrust not die she is in the process of decay, where history has not stop it has broken down to a waste land. By bringing together these broken images, Eliot constructed a summation of thousands of years of history. Many voices all oratory at once, alienated from one another by distinct times, different thoughts, and different experiences but connected through societys greenness sub-consciousness and brought together by The Waste Land.

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