T. S. Eliot is one of the major contributor to
Anglo-American Modernism, the turn-of-the-century eclectic movement that revolutionized
literature and the arts. Eliot's poetry strives to observe the Modernist dictum of "Make
it new" by creating texts that are less emotional than Romantic poems and whose images
are more concrete and less vague. In his essay on "The Metaphysical Poets", Eliot writes
that poetry should respond to the complexity of modern life so "the poet must become
more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning."
These
are all features that we can observe in The Waste Land. The
complexity and the fragmentation of modern life is reflected in the fragmented style of
the poem and the juxtaposition of different images (a visual parallel could be drawn
with certain paintings by Picasso and Braque). Each section of the poem is formed by
several fragments put together whose narrative continuum is achieved through consistent
tone and atmosphere. These emphasize the sterility of the present as contrasted to the
fertility of a mythical past. Another important modernist technique employed in
The Waste Land is the comprehensive cultural, historical and
literary references to past epochs and mythological traditions. Talking about James
Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot defined this technique as "the mythical
method", a constant parallel between the writer's contemporary age and the past achieved
through mythological references in the depiction of ordinary and common sketches. Eliot
concluded that this techniques was "a way of . . . giving a shape and a significance to
the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history".
The poem's fragmentation is further heightened by
the juxtaposition of different poetic styles (ranging from passages in Elizabethan
English to lines that reproduce the jargon of the working class), forms such as
monolgues and choruses and metres.
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