2. 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. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety.
The title of the poem 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’s central theme is the
apathy with which humans view
individual suffering.
The poem juxtaposes ordinary
events and extraordinary ones: 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 particular period of modernism; in
the broadest terms, it refers to 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”: the divide
between capital-A Art and mass culture.
High modernism sits firmly on the side of
Art, in opposition to popular or mass culture.
(Postmodernism, according to Huyssen, may
be defined precisely by its rejection of this
same distinction.)
I am considering a
footnote for my
footnote so the
masses might be
able to
understand my
genius…
7. Biblical stories
Literary allusions
Eastern and Arthurian
Myths
Fragmentation
Foreign Languages
Footnotes (with
footnotes)
The poem is an elitist document, in the
high modern tradition. 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
scholarly 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. 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?
12. 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
13.
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)
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?
15. Part I: The Burial of the Dead
3. Why is April “the cruellest
month”?
4. Who is Madame Sosostris?
16. 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 with 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.
18. Part II: A Game of Chess
5. Who is Philomel? What
meaning might that
reference add to the poem?
19. The Nervous Society Woman
6. Think of
lines 109-123 as
a conversation
between a
married couple.
What kind of a
conversation do
they have?
20.
21. 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?
23. 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.
24.
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
10. What role does Mr.
Eugenides, the Smyrna
merchant play here? What is
he proposing to the speaker?
26. Tiresias and the Typist
11. What function does
Tiresias, the blind
prophet of dual gender,
serve in the poem (line
218-230)?
28. The Typist
12. Lines 218-
255 present an
encounter
between two
lovers. How
would you
characterize this
encounter? Does
it seem to be a
pleasant one?
29. 13. What about the story of the
canoe trip? What’s going on here?
14. How are love and sexuality
treated in this section?
30. 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?
31. 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.
32.
33. 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?
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.
