Thomas Stearns Eliot and The Waste Land

In a nutshell

Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American poet known for his particular writing style and for writing about alienation. His most emblematic work is The Waste Land.

The Author's Life

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri in 1888. He attended Harvard and later Oxford and settled in London for work. In 1917, he published his first collection of poems: Prufrock and Other Observations, which placed him as an important avant-garde poet. An unhappy marriage and a mental breakdown after the war resulted in his masterpiece The Waste Land (1922), which he wrote in a sanatorium in Lausanne at 33 years old; poetry was Eliot's comfort to overcome his situation and represent the general crisis of Western culture.

Note: Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to Ezra Pound with a quotation from Dante's Purgatory 'il miglior fabbro - the better craftsman', as a symbol of gratitude for helping him to reduce the poem to its final form.

In 1925, The Hollow Men was published as a sequel to The Waste Land. Eliot was also an influential literacy critic, in his essays The Sacred Wood (1920) and Selected Essays (1932), he presents the problems of style and technique, as well as the importance to be impersonal and separating 'the man who suffers' from 'the mind which creates'. In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in London in 1965.

Main Topics

Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote about topics such as time, regeneration, tranquillity, and mortality. However, his most predominant themes were alienation and fragmentation.

FRAGMENTATION AND ALIENATION

Historical images such as the quest for the Holy Grail, the Bible, Dante, and Shakespeare are used by Eliot to mirror society's old traditions and styles. A poem that gave new meaning to something old was the result of fragmentation and reassembly of historical narratives.

The contrast between the richness of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present world was portrayed by alienated characters. For example, The Waste Land depicts the breakdown of social and historical order, destroyed by the war and by the forces operating under the name of modernity.

ELIOT'S WRITING STYLE

Eliot's writing was composed of a mix of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the ode, the quatrain, and free verse. He used the technique of implication to build a bridge between the reader and the speaker to experience the same world. In addition, Eliot applied the technique of the 'objective correlative', which was the attempt to communicate a description or monologue of philosophical reflections or feelings through a simile. Another element used in his work was the juxtaposition and repetition of words, images, and phrases.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a collection of poems written by T.S. Eliot in 1922. It consists of 434 lines divided into five sections:

I. 'The Burial of the Dead' (centers on the contrast of life and death, sterility and fertility).	II. 'A Game of Chess' (juxtaposes the present squalor to a past ambiguous splendour).
III. 'The Fire Sermon' (present alienation is rendered through the description of loveless and mechanical sexual encounter).	IV. 'Death by Water' (reinforces the idea of a spiritual shipwreck).
V. 'What the Thunder Said' (evokes religions from East and West).

In this work, Eliot contrasts the meaningless life with allusions to the Arthurian legend and the quest for the Holy Grail, a metaphor for the human search for spiritual salvation. He makes references to myths related to the rebirth of nature, the paradigm of fertility, and the Celtic culture.

The following text is an extract from The Waste Land, Section I, The Burial of the Dead:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers. [...]

(Eliot T.S.)

This stanza depicts an image of spring rain falling into dried lilacs, the speaker remains unknown to readers since the pronoun us suggests more than one character. The center of the poem is the dead land, which gives rise to the regeneration topic.