This is the blog about the presentation on the overview of " The Waste Land".
Introduction:-
The waste land is one of the most popular poems of the 20th century. It is written by T.S. Eliot. It has been saluted as Eliot’s masterpiece the supreme power of the poetic art in modern times. It is a poem written in the epic mold. It presents messages for our turbulent times.
T. S. Eliot:-
The poem 'The Waste Land' is written by Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an American-born British poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.
He has won the Nobel prize for literature in the year of 1948. With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. The poem’s original manuscript of about 800 lines was cut down to 434 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is not Eliot’s greatest poem, though it is his most famous. Nevertheless, Eliot was unequaled by any other 20th-century poet in the ways in which he commanded the attention of his audience.
Notable works :
✍️ "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
✍️ The Waste Land (1922)
✍️ Four Quartets (1943)
✍️ Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
About poem:-
The Waste Land poem is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. ( Valentine Low ) In this poem we can find that the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts that Eliot peppered throughout the poem. In addition to the many "highbrow" references and quotes from poets like Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Homer, as well as Wagner's libretti, Eliot also included several references to "lowbrow" genres.
In poem we find 434 lines.
The five parts of The Waste Land are entitled:
1 ) The Burial of the dead
2) A Game of Chess
3) The fire sermon
4) Death by water
5) What the thunder said
Part I opens with the famous line, "April is the cruellest month." The speaker, Marie, is a young woman who bears witness to the physical and emotional devastation caused by the war.
Parts II and III describe the inside of a wealthy woman's bedroom and the garbage-filled waters of the Thames, respectively. Part IV eulogizes a drowned man named Phlebas.
In the fifth and final part of the poem, the speaker "translates" the thunderclaps cracking over an Indian jungle. The poem ends with the repetition of the Sanskrit word for peace: "Shantih shantih shantih."
Title:-
The title Eliot chose was The Waste Land. In his first note to the poem he attributes the title to Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance.
The poem's title is often mistakenly given as "Waste Land" (as used by Weston) or "Wasteland", omitting the definite article. However, in a letter to Ezra Pound, Eliot politely insisted that the title was three words beginning with "The".
Character list:-
1)Fisher King :
In Arthurian legend, the Fisher King, also known as the Wounded King or Maimed King, is the last in a long bloodline charged with keeping the Holy Grail.
2)Madame Sosostris :
Madame Sosostris figure is a reference to Miss Jessie Weston’s book.
3)Phlebas :
Describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning.
4)Mr. Eugenides :
Mr. Eugenides is a Smyrna merchant.
5)Philomela :
Philomela or Philomel is a minor figure in Greek mythology.She is identified as being the "princess of Athens" and the younger of two daughters of Pandion I, King of Athens, and Zeuxippe.
6)The Narrator :
At times the Narrator seems to be Eliot himself; at other times he stands in for all humanity. In "The Fire Sermon" he is at one point the Fisher King of the Grail legend, at another the blind prophet Tiresias. When he seems to reflect Eliot, the extent to which his ruminations are autobiographical is ambiguous.
7)Stetson :
A friend of the Narrator's, who fought in the war with him.
8)The Rich Lady:
Never referred to by name, she sits in the resplendent drawing room of "A Game of Chess."
9)Typist :
Lonely, a creature of the modern world. She is visited by a "young man carbuncular," who sleeps with her.
There are so many themes in poem:-
Themes:-
1) The seasons
2) Sex
3) Memory and the past
4) Water
5) Rebirth
6) Religion
7) History
8) Lust
9) Isolation
10) Appearances
1)The Seasons:-The Waste Land opens with an invocation of April, the cruellest month. That spring be depicted as cruel is a curious choice on Eliot’s part, but as a paradox it informs the rest of the poem to a great degree. What brings life brings also death; the seasons fluctuate, spinning from one state to another, but, like history, they maintain some sort of stasis; not everything changes.
2)Sex:-
In "The Waste Land," the status of sex is pretty much a measuring stick for how morally demolished society is. On several occasions, when it comes time for Eliot to show how truly low we've all fallen, he points toward sex—and not just sex, but the separation of sex from love.
3) Memory and the past:-
There's just no getting away from the past in "The Waste Land," but Eliot's biggest criticism of modern society is that it has gotten too far away from the past. Throughout this poem, you encounter a lot of personal memories; but for Eliot, these aren't nearly as important as the "cultural memory" he's trying to preserve in this poem.
4)Water:-
"The Waste Land" lacks water water promises rebirth. At the same time, however, water can bring about death. Eliot sees the card of the drowned Phoenician sailor and later titles the fourth section of his poem after Madame Sosostris‟ mandate that he fear “death by water.” When the rain finally arrives at the close of the poem, it does suggest the cleansing of sins, the washing away of misdeeds, and the start of a new future; however, with it comes thunder, and therefore perhaps lightning.
5)Rebirth:-
The Christ images in the poem, along with the many other religious metaphors, posit rebirth and resurrection as central themes. The Waste Land lies fallow and the Fisher King is impotent; what is needed is a new beginning. Water, for one, can bring about that rebirth, but it can also destroy.
6)Religion:-
For Eliot, one of the single greatest causes of Western civilization becoming "The Waste Land" is the fact that religion doesn't really have the influence it once did. In the old days, people didn't have to worry so much about questions like "Why am I here?" or "What's the meaning of life," because religion already had answers for these questions.
7)History:-
History, Eliot suggests, is a repeating cycle. When he calls to Stetson, the Punic War stands in for World War I; this substitution is crucial because it is shocking. At the time Eliot wrote "The Waste Land," the First World War was definitively a first - the "Great War" for those who had witnessed it. There had been none to compare with it in history.
8)Lust:-
Perhaps the most famous episode in "The Waste Land" involves a female typist’s liaison with a carbuncula man. Eliot depicts the scene as something akin to a rape. This chance sexual encounter carries with it mythological baggage – the violated Philomela, the blind Tiresias who lived for a time as a woman. Sexuality runs through "The Waste Land," taking center stage as a cause of calamity in “The Fire Sermon.”
9)Isolation:-
Question: Hey Eliot, what's so wrong with the modern world?
Eliot's answer: Everyone is way too selfish.
Question: So what?
Eliot's answer: Well, haven't you ever wondered why you're so lonely? That's why.
In "The Waste Land," the great despair of modern existence doesn't just come from a sense of meaninglessness, but from a very deep loneliness. This loneliness, in turn, is something Eliot thinks we create for ourselves by constantly pursuing our own selfish interests. It's pretty simple: you can't spend your whole life trying to beat the people around you, then turn around and complain about being lonely.
10) Apperance:-
Simply put, there are some pretty unattractive characters walking around "The Waste Land." The worst of all might be the two-thousand-year-old Tiresias, with his wrinkled dugs but the pimply-faced young man carbuncular might give the prophet a run for his money in the Ugliest Eliot Character pagean.
Symbols:-
Thank you...
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