The Waste Land

He was one of the greatest modern American writers. Born in 1888 in Missouri, he started to write in 1905. In 1914 he leaves America for England, where he meets Ezra Pound and marries Vivienne High-Wood. In 1917 he publishes his first volume Prufrock and Other Observations, followed by another two volumes of poems, Poems 1919 and Era Vos Prec 1920. In 1922 he publishes the poem The Waste Land, the same time James Joyce published his Ulysses. He writes this poem being in a convalescence period after a nervous breakdown, while working at a bank. Ezra Pound modified the first manuscript of the poem and suggested some changes so that the poem look like it does now. In 1948 he receives the Nobel Prize for literature. He dies in 1965, and Ezra Pound said at his death: Rest in peace. I can only repeat as insistent as I were fifty years ago: READ HIM. The Waste Land is a 434 line modern poem that has been called one of the most important poems of the 20th century(Bennett, Alan,12 July2009). Even if the poem is very obscure because of its changes between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unexpected changes of speaker time and location; he received great acclaims and became a familiar work of modern literature. Some of its most important themes are: the sterility, the emptiness and the ugliness of an preestablished civilization, the demise of human and cultural values in modern world. The fight for a spiritual resurrection, the meditation on time passing and eternity are other themes presented in the poem. All of the themes are presented in the contrast with past by using a wide system of allusions and quotations which came from Bible, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare to Baudelaire and other symbolist writers ( Cartianu, Ana, Preda, Ioan, Aurel, 1970:126). This poem amazed the critics and created sensation, especially among the teenagers who saw in Eliot a precursor of modern era, a literary icon whose poetic technique, artistic vision and sensibility had

a great impact. The drafts of the poem reveal that it originally was bigger that its now. The cuts were made by Eliot himself on Ezra Pound suggestions. The most famous lines of the poem are April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, I will show you fear in a handful of dust and the mantra in the Sanskrit language shantih shantih shantih. The poem has five sections, The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What the Thunder Said. The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes, purporting to explain authors metaphors, references and allusions added when the publisher requested something longer to justify printing the poem in a separate book. The poem was firstly intended as a collection of individual poems or considered one poem with five sections, as the author himself stated. About the title, Eliot said that it was first He do the Police in different Voices, title under which the first two sections of the poem appeared. This phrase was taken from Charles Dickenss novel Our Mutual Friend in which the widow Betty Higden says about her adopted foundling son Sloppy You mightnt think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices. This title revealed that while there were many different voices in the poem there was only one central consciousness (www.wkipedia.org, November 2011). The actual title, Eliot attributes to Jessie L. Westons book on the Grail legend From Ritual to Romance with an allusion to the wounding of the Fisher King and the subsequent sterility of his lands. A similar poem in theme and language called Waste Land was published in 1913 under the signature of Madison Cawein. Eliot insisted that his works title begins with The. The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot interest in exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue. The Waste Land is made up of a wide variety of voices, in monologue, dialogue or with more than two characters speaking. Eliot himself declared that he had many sources in writing this poem. Among them are works of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Gerard de Verval, Thomas Kid,

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Bible, the book of Common Prayer, the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Buddhas Fire Sermon, The Golden Bough of Sir James Frazer and Jessie Westons From Ritual to Romance. The author employed a lot of symbols among which are firstly the Waste Land, then the Fisher King, the Tarot Deck, the Perilous Chapel, the Grail Quest, etc. In the notes added to the poem, Eliot somehow comments on the poem and makes it easier to understand. He included in his poem the Tarot Deck, the Tarot pack of cards about which he declared that he was unconscious about the exact constitution of this pack of cards but that he appealed to tradition in explaining to himself its usage. So he used the Tarot cards in two purposes: firstly because the Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack was associated in his mind with the Hanged God of Frazer and secondly because he associated the Hanged Man with the hooded figure of the disciple to Emmaus. Other members of Tarot pack of cards appear later. He includes the Phoenician Sailor, the Merchant, the crowds of people and Death by Water in Part IV. Another member of Tarot pack, the man with three Staves, is associated by the author with the Fisher king himself. He describes London by the syntax used by Baudelaire Unreal City/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn. To conclude the idea taken from Baudelaire, Eliot uses another source, Dante Alighieris Inferno A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many. The last lines of the first section, the author wrote inspiring from preface to Baudelaires Fleurs du mal Or with his nails hell dig it up again! / You! Hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, -mon frre! In the second section A Game of Chess the whole sequence is taken off from the game of chess in Middletons Women Beware Women. He also includes in here scene from Paradise Lost of V. Milton As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene, and from Metamorphoses the scene about Philomela The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king/ so rudely forced In the third section, The Fire Sermon, the author includes scenes from The Tempest This music crept by me upon the waters, from The Vicar of Wakefield Well now thats done: and Im glad

its over, from Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri Trams and dusty trees/ Highbury bore me, from Buddhas Fire Sermon To Carthage then I came/ Burning burning burning burning. The forth section Death by Water has no source; the author made it all by himself without including passages from other works. In the fifth section What the Thunder Said the author includes the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous from Miss Westons book and the decay of Eastern Europe. He also writes some lines being stimulated by some of Shackleton expeditions to Antarctic which related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member that could actually be counted (T.S.Eliot. The Waste Land) He also includes lines suggested by F.H.Bradleys Appearance and Reality, by Westons From Ritual to Romance, by Kyds Spanish Tragedy, by Dante Alighieris Inferno (I have heard the key/ Turn in the door once and turn once only) and Purgatorio (Poi sascose nel foco che gli affina/ Quando fiam uti chelidon), etc. The final line is one of its famous lines, the only world Shantih repeated, a formal ending to an Upanishad, representing a peace which will never be complete. In The Waste Land Eliot discovered his time spirit by letting to be known the efforts and disillusions of his fellows, made to discover the moral and spiritual limits and the necessity of establishing a new tradition which could replace the emptiness the Great War let in human culture. Eliots entire work shows the attempt of the writer in defining the new tradition and identifying the problems and methods of recognizing the complexity and obscurity of modern life. As well as Joyces Ulysses, Eliots The Waste Land presents a modern poet whose work described exactly the time he lived and still continues to describe those times. The Waste Land is one of the principals modern works which establishes the roots of some other poets works written after Eliots life.

Bibliography:
Bennett, Alan (12 July 2009) Margates shrine to Eliots muse. The Guardian. Retrieved 1September 2009; Burt, S. Daniel, 100 cei mai mari scriitori ai lumii, (trad.Ionescu Anca Irina), Bucuresti, Ed. Liter, Ed.Star, 2005, p.307-310; Cartianu, Ana, Preda, Ioan Aurel, Dictionar al literaturii engleze, Bucuresti, Ed.Stiintifica, 1970, p.126,127; Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land, Bucuresti, Ed. Cartea romaneasca, 2005.