6/24/2023 0 Comments The waste land and other writings![]() Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernismĭoes the fragmentary nature of the poem merely reflect the randomness and contingency of the world, or, as other readers would have it, does the poem have an overarching structure, or rationale or argument in which some form of salvation is achieved or achievable?Īnthropology had a huge influence on Eliot – the new readings of cultural history, where belief systems were seen to be similar across time and the world, and the need for such was being understood. Whenever the reading was subsequently referred to she was less than enthusiastic, commenting: “ That Dreadful poem – the Desert?” T S Eliot once read The Waste Land to the Queen Mother as a personal favour. Richards – Eliot captured the “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.” One of its major themes is the barrenness of a post-war world in which human sexuality has been perverted from its normal course and the natural world too has become infertile. ![]() ![]() ![]() Though Eliot described the poem as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life…just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” it was seen, and it is now seen to represent a general crisis in western culture. The poem describes a sense of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the First World War and from Eliot’s personal troubles. ![]()
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