The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot Influences: Charles Baudelaire Anti-romanticism Greek, Latin, German, French language George Santayana Dante Works: Philosophical and literary reviews First poem (1915) – The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. First poetic collection (1917) – Prufrock and other observations. "The Waste Land" caused a sensation when it was published in 1922, in the middle of his creation. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century.The Waste Land

I. The Burial of the Dead II. A Game of Chess III. The Fire Sermon IV. Death By Water V. What the Thunder Said

Major Themes  Death-Rebirth  The Seasons  Love  Water  History  The Holy Grail  War  Mourning

Structure-Style  Sequence of scenes and images- no interruption  Multiple perspectives  Multiple settings  Cubist  The poem’s feeling is evident  Distorted quotations  Mythological-religious themes

Plot-analysis  “The Burial of the Dead”: a line in the Anglican burial service.  Made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker.  1 st section (1-18): Marie’s biographical snippet.  Isolation of humanity.  Cycle of seasons-death.

 2 nd section(l ): a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste.  Biblical tone (l )  Izekiel  Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde(l ).  Opera form

 3 rd episode: an imaginative tarot reading-some of the cards are not part of an actual tarot deck.  Madame Sosostris  Tarot cards -The “Holy Grail”.

Tarot Cards

 4 th episode:the most surreal.  A London populated by ghosts of the dead.  “Inferno-like” city. Dante.  Stetson.  You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”. Baudlaire