2. English poet, playwright, critic, and
librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a
major influence on the poetry of the 20th
century. Auden grew up in Birmingham,
England and was known for his
extraordinary intellect and wit. His first
book, Poems, was published in 1930 with
the help of T.S. Eliot. Just before World
War II broke out, Auden emigrated to the
United States where he met the poet
Chester Kallman who became his lifelong
lover. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in
1948 for The Age of Anxiety. Much of his
poetry is concerned with moral issues and
evidences a strong political, social, and
psychological context.
The basic premise of the poem is response to
tragedy, or as the song goes "Obla Di, Obla Da,
Life Goes On." The title refers to the Museum of
Fine Arts in Brussels. Auden visited the museum
in 1938 and viewed the painting by Brueghel,
which the poem is basically about. Generalizing
at first, and then going into specifics the poem
theme is the apathy with which humans view
individual suffering.
Auden wrote that "In so far as poetry, or any of
the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose,
it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and
disintoxicate."
The poem juxtaposes ordinary events and
exraordinary ones, although extraordinary
events seem to deflate to everyday ones with his
descriptions. Life goes on while a "miraculous
birth occurs", but also while "the disaster" of
Icarus's death happens.
3. Modernism
The Waste Land
Originally titled, "He Do the Police in
Different Voices,” a reference to Our Mutual
Friend by Charles Dickens.
Context
Barriers to Reading
The Five Parts
http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/
Author Presentation
E.M. Forster
4. The Waste Land (1922) epitomizes modernism and
reflects the anxiety of those people who survived the
dark times during and after WWI. Its self-conscious
desire to be new, and its bleak analysis of the present
as a moment between a crumbling past and an
uncertain future shows the worry of western
civilization.
The overarching poem is greater than the sum of its five
parts. Eliot combines many of the themes and
techniques from in his earlier work, themes such as
aridity, sexuality, and living death, and techniques
such as stream-of-consciousness; narration; historical,
literary, and mythic allusions; and the dramatic
monologue to create a new style.
5. High literary modernism is a term used to describe a
subgenre of literary modernism, generally encompassing
works published between the end of the First World
War and the beginning of the Second. High modernism is
primarily characterized by a complete and unambiguous
embrace of what Andreas Huyssen (Columbia
University) calls the "Great Divide." That is, there is a clear
distinction between capital-A Art and mass culture, and it
places itself firmly on the side of Art and in opposition to
popular or mass culture. (Postmodernism, according to
Huyssen, may be defined precisely by its rejection of this
distinction.)
7. Biblical stories
Literary allusions
Eastern and Arthurian
Myths
Fragmentation
Foreign Languages
Footnotes (with
footnotes)
The poem is an elitist document. Eliot
provides copious footnotes, and the
text is loaded with difficult literary,
historical, and anthropological
allusions; it is meant to be understood
only by a few. As an account of the
dilemma faced by the West of its being
threatened by the loss of its privileged,
white, patriarchal position of cultural
dominance in the first half of the
twentieth century, The Waste Land is
indispensable.
8. How to Start
In order to understand The Waste Land,
envision the work as a spliced and fragmented
film, a montage, that is, a piecing together of
sections, of images and sounds. This
imaginary film could be a real-life
documentary: there are no heroes or heroines,
and there is no narrator telling readers what
to think or how to feel. Instead, multiple
voices tell their individual stories. Many of the
stories portray a degenerate or unsavory
society; other stories include Elizabethan
England, ancient Greek mythology, and
Buddhist scriptures.
9. In the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker is an old Austro-Hungarian
noblewoman reminiscing about the golden days of her youth before the disasters of
World War I.
The second section, “A Game of Chess,” is set in the boudoir of a fashionable
contemporary Englishwoman.
The third part, “The Fire Sermon,” mixes images of Elizabeth’s England, the Thames
and Rhine rivers, and the legend of the Greek seer Tiresias.
The fourth, “Death by Water,” is a brief portrait of a drowned Phoenician sea-trader.
The fifth, “What the Thunder Said,” combines the above themes with that of religious
peace. These parts combine to create a meaning that encompasses all of them.
Because the poem is so complex, meaning is interpreted in many ways; however, many
students of the poem have suggested that, generally, Eliot shows his readers the
collapse of Western culture in the aftermath of the war.
10. "Nam Sibyllam
quidem Cumis ego
ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere,
et cum illi pueri
dicerent: Σιβυλλα
τι θελεις;
respondebat illa:
αποθανειν θελω."
"For with my own eyes, I
saw the Sibyl of Cumae
hanging in a bottle and
when the young boys
asked her, "Sibyl, what do
you want?" she replied, "I
want to die."
11. Part 1 is a natural beginning for Eliot’s Poem because the
speaker, Marie, describes her memories of a key period in
modern history. Clearly, her life has been materially and
culturally rich. Now, as an old woman, her thoughts of
the past seem to embitter her. This section describes the
visions of the Sibyl, a prophetess in Greek mythology,
and compare these to the pseudo fortune-telling of a
modern Sibyl, Madame Sosostris.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rpFBSO65P4
00:02 — I. The Burial of the Dead 05:00 — II. A Game of Chess 10:22 — III. The Fire Sermon 18:15 — IV. Death by Water 18:55
— V. What the Thunder Said
12.
13. Part I: The Burial of the Dead
1. Look at the epigraph and read the
translation in the footnotes. Who is the Sibyl?
What does this epigraph imply about Eliot’s
thematic intentions in “The Waste Land”?
2. The first line should make you think of
another famous first line—what is it? What
meaning does this allusion add to Eliot’s
poem?
3. Why is April “the cruellest month”?
4. Who is Madame Sosostris?
14. April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (1-4)
15. In part two, a narrator describes the sensual
décor of a wealthy woman’s bedroom—the
ornate chair, marble floor and carved
fireplace, her glittering jewels and heavy
perfumes. She is bickering her husband or
maybe her lover, and complains that her
“nerves are bad to-night.”
Then a contrasting setting appears: a London
pub. Two women are gossiping in Cockney
English about a friend’s marriage gone bad.
17. Part II: A Game of Chess
5. Who is Philomel? What meaning might
that reference add to the poem?
6. Think of lines 109-123 as a
conversation between a married couple.
What kind of a conversation do they have?
7. What’s going on with Lil and her
husband?
8. What did Lil do with the money
intended for her false teeth? How does this
fit in with the broader themes of the poem?
9. How does this part of the poem
represent love and sexuality?
22. A description of the River Thames begins part 3.
The narrator juxtaposes the once beautiful river
that earlier poets saw with the garbage-filled
canal of the twentieth century. Most of this
section tells the story of an uninspired
seduction. The speaker, ironically, is the Greek
sage Tiresias, who, in legend, was changed from
a man into a woman. In this androgynous
mode, Tiresias can reflect on both the male and
the female aspects of the modern-day affair
between a seedy clerk and a tired typist. We will
also look at two other “uninspired” seductions.
23.
24. Part III: The Fire Sermon
10. What role does Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna
merchant play here? What is he proposing to the
speaker?
11. What function does Tiresias, the blind prophet of
dual gender, serve in the poem (line 218-230)?
12. Lines 218-255 present an encounter between two
lovers. How would you characterize this encounter?
Does it seem to be a pleasant one?
13. What about the story of the canoe trip? What’s
going on here?
14. How are love and sexuality treated in this section?
25. 207.Unreal City
208.Under the brown fog of a winter noon
209.Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
210.Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
211.C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
212.Asked me in demotic French
213.To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
214.Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
Mr. Eugenides
30. The brief stanzas in part 4
picture Phlebas, a Middle
Eastern merchant from the
late classical period. The
tone is elegiac: The speaker
imagines the bones of the
young trader washed by the
seas and advises the reader
to consider the brevity of
life.
31.
32. Part IV: Death by Water
15. What happens to Phlebas the
Phoenician? Does this section
advance the plot? If so, how?
16. Why does Eliot transition
from fire to water?
17. How does this relate to
Madame Sosostris’s prophecy?
33.
34. The final section is set in a barren landscape, perhaps the Waste Land itself,
where heat lays its heavy hand on apostles of some sacrificed god, perhaps
Christ himself. The opening stanza’s description of “torchlight on sweaty faces”
in a garden and an “agony in stony places” suggests this Christian
interpretation. Hope, however, has fled the holy man’s followers, who wander
through the desert listening to thunder that is never followed by rain.
Nevertheless, the thunder holds some small promise.
The poem shifts setting again. The thunder crashes over an Indian jungle while
the speaker listens and “translates” the thunderclaps. The thunder speaks
three words in Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, which is also the language
of Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. The first word is “Datta” (“given”), the second
is “Dayadhvam” (“compassion”), and the third is “Damyata” (“control”). In this
three-part message from the natural world, which tells of God’s gifts of
compassion and self-control, the speaker finally finds cause for “peace”—the
“shantih” of the closing line.
35.
36. Part V: What the Thunder Said
18. What three things does the thunder say? What do they
mean?
19. What is the meaning of the phrase “these fragments I
have shored against my ruins”?
20. What does shantih mean?
21. What strategies for survival or at least for
understanding do the poem's final three stanzas involve?
22. Does Eliot leave room for hope by the end of the poem?
If so, what lines depict that?
38. After
23. How does the experience of the war
inform the shattered and spectral world
of T.S. Eliot’s postwar Waste
Land? What traces of war and
destruction do you find in section 3?
24. Identify and discuss a couple of
major Modernist themes found in T.S.
Eliot's The Waste Land
