The waste land Cisilino Francesca Cl. 5ALS

T.S.Eliot wrote “The Waste Land” in 1921. The first work of T.S. Eliot is “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. In this poem the reader can notice the writer’s principal elements: there are shortage of explicit logic transitions, mixtures thanks to parallelism, quotations and intertextualities. At first only few critics appraise his work, including Ezra Pound. Indeed T.S. Eliot’s poems are about time, the I, communicated in a fragmentary way.

The poetic dialogs are shaped into a lot of scene combined thanks to the atmosphere. Eliot is not sequential or monologic, he uses a relational and dialogical method. Eliot relates subject and object, present and past, reality and myth and text and text. In 1923 Eliot in The Dial(review) defined the mythical method.

The mythical method is used to shape the contemporary world. It is a method already used by W.B. Yeats. There is no logical reasoning. The way to evaluate the sonnets that were previously written changes. Eliot is concerned to understand why such a work is considered "innovative". Ordinary people think that an innovative work is something new than something did previously.

The more innovative work is the one that has the more literary tradition within himself. To be innovative a writer must have the whole literary tradition in his bones. This is why a young poet will never be innovative. Eliot juxtaposes things to things that are already there, to see how they relate. It is a widespread method in the 1900 culture.

The modern poetic texts are made by absorbing and destroying other texts in the intertextual space: they’re discursive alter-giunzioni (different additions to the speech). No internal conjunctions, syntax self-sufficient in articulating their own way but there are alter-junctions. Therefore each element in these additions alludes, contests, denies, parodies texts that precede it. His method is deeply intertextual and mythic.

He has recourse to Kristeva: “the poetic meaning refers to other discursive meanings, so that in the statement can be read high speeches. This creates around the poetic meaning a multiple textual space, whose elements are likely to be integrated in the concrete poetic text. The result is a paradigmatic effect, to absorb a variety of ways in poetic language, which occurs around a centralized way.

That way in a poet like Eliot is the semantic paralysis of a negative present, until the moment of conversion, which occurred in 1927. Writers share of such a structural and literary crisis incorporate polystylism, parodic contortion, frequent use of allusions and quotations, contextualization of all closed systems in their poetic discourse. The modernist poetry of Eliot denies the closure of meanings.

The meeting with Ezra Pound is a meeting on the common ground of the mythical method. Pound was faithful to the mythical method. Eliot wrote this long poem, Pound reads it and he begins to cut everything that was narrative, sequential.