CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF ELIOT s WASTELAND
CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF ELIOT’S WASTELAND
T.S.Eliot was born in the United States in 1888 and was educated there and in France before settling down in England and at length adopting British citizenship. He published his first poems Prufrock and other Observations in 1917 and all his work is strongly individual and creatively personal. With The Wasteland(1922) he established the reputation which made him the leading living poet of the English speaking world, though his output for some years was extremely small, consisting of little more in verse than two short pieces, “The Journey of the Magi” and “Ash Wednesday”. The Wasteland presented a disturbing vision of the state of the contemporary world, a vision of human society as Eliot saw it after the war: confused, dirty, barren in spirit and altogether horrible. The poem made a tremendous impact on the post-War generation, and is considered one of the most important documents of its age. The Wasteland is in many ways a compressed epic. It does for its period what Virgil and Milton did for theirs, though of course its scale is considerably smaller than that of Aenied and Paradise Lost. It attempts to portray the state of civilization, out of which it grows, combining essentially the history of that civilization, its present condition, and its understanding of life essentially its understanding of God. The Wasteland expresses poignantly a desperate sense of the poet and the age’s lack of positive spiritual faith. The waste is not the devastation of the war but it is the post war disruption of the Western civilization, the emotional and spiritual sterility of modern man. Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, it presents modern London as an arid, wasteland. The poem is build around the symbols of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth, and this fundamental idea is referred to throughout. The speaker of the poem is an identifiable character, a quester, who is somehow performing
T.S.Eliot was born in the United States in 1888 and was educated there and in France before settling down in England and at length adopting British citizenship. He published his first poems Prufrock and other Observations in 1917 and all his work is strongly individual and creatively personal. With The Wasteland(1922) he established the reputation which made him the leading living poet of the English speaking world, though his output for some years was extremely small, consisting of little more in verse than two short pieces, “The Journey of the Magi” and “Ash Wednesday”. The Wasteland presented a disturbing vision of the state of the contemporary world, a vision of human society as Eliot saw it after the war: confused, dirty, barren in spirit and altogether horrible. The poem made a tremendous impact on the post-War generation, and is considered one of the most important documents of its age. The Wasteland is in many ways a compressed epic. It does for its period what Virgil and Milton did for theirs, though of course its scale is considerably smaller than that of Aenied and Paradise Lost. It attempts to portray the state of civilization, out of which it grows, combining essentially the history of that civilization, its present condition, and its understanding of life essentially its understanding of God. The Wasteland expresses poignantly a desperate sense of the poet and the age’s lack of positive spiritual faith. The waste is not the devastation of the war but it is the post war disruption of the Western civilization, the emotional and spiritual sterility of modern man. Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, it presents modern London as an arid, wasteland. The poem is build around the symbols of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth, and this fundamental idea is referred to throughout. The speaker of the poem is an identifiable character, a quester, who is somehow performing