The Waste Land

Text: The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot; pgs 1430-1443

After reading The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot I feel more confused than I was before I read the text. I found The Waste Land to be a series of loops which were yearning to become straight lines and squares trying to fit into circular cut outs. Every time I thought to myself that something was making sense Eliot would steer the reader in a completely different direction and I would be lost in the sea of words yet again. I found this text, needless to say, frustrating. However, regardless of how often I felt as though I was drowning in a sea of words, I still find myself liking the modernists as well as The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Yet because I found this text to be quite confusing I must warn you that this post may be just as confusing as the text!

While reading The Waste Land I kept of list of everything that I found similar to other modernists we have covered so far and differences which I found. Throughout the entire text I only found two things which I thought were different from other modernists. Everything else I noticed or took away from The Waste Land seemed to be typical of a modernist. However, I do admit that because I found the text confusing I may have missed some critical differences or similarities. One can't be too sure when she spends most of the time looking at the piece as though it is written in a foreign language!

There were several similarities I found with The Waste Land and texts written by other modernists. I noticed that there was a definitely fragmented outlook on everything presented, which is something which we identified with the modernists. Also the text seemed very impersonal, also common with the modernists. "I can connect/Nothing with nothing" (pg. 1439/lines 301-302) which to me means that the 'narrator' also feels isolated from everything. Nature seemed to be mention quite often, however, it was not an optimistic view of nature as it was with say Walt Whitman. Eliot seems to take a look at the darker side of nature; which is something I noticed with some other modernists we've studied thus far. Basically it seemed as though Eliot had a very bleak outlook on the world and society, which goes along with other modernists.

As I stated earlier I didn't find too much that was different about The Waste Land in comparison with other modernists we've studied. One thing I thought was different was the fact that this was sort of story like. It seemed to tell a story, which is not something we saw in other modernists texts (with the exception of Dorothy Parker's The Waltz). Another thing that I noticed which I thought was quite different from other modernists, was the structure which Eliot used. In a lot of other modernists texts the structure is unique and different than poets before. However, in Eliot's The Waste Land the structure seemed quite traditional. The stanzas seemed traditional as did his lines. What made The Waste Land so unique and considered a "modernist text" is the content and the way in which it is presented, not in the structure.