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T.S Eliot and The wast land - Coggle Diagram
T.S Eliot and The wast land
Life
1922
He published The Waste Land
1925
He became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber
1917
He established himself as an important avant-garde poet
1927
He baemes a British citizen and joins the Church of England
1915
He was unhappily married to British ballet dancer
1930
Fort the next thirty years he was considered as the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking word
1910
He studied in Paris at the Sorbonne
He received the Nobel Prize for Literature
1888
he was born in St Louis, Missouri
1965
he died in London
Work
1922
the wast Land, it is said to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century
1925
The Hollow Men, a sequel to the Waste Land
Before the conversion = pessimistic vision of the world.
After the conversion = the keywords of the works were: purification, hope, joy.
Vision the word
Chaotic
Futile
Pessimistic
Unstable
Loss of faith
Collapse of moral values
Confused sense of identity
The impersonality of the artist
The poet has not a personality to express, but a medium and not a personality’.
The emotion of art is impersonal’
Eliot shared the view of the importance for the artist to be impersonal and to separate the 'suffering man' from the 'creating mind'.
The wast land
Content
It is an autobiography written at a moment of crisis in the poet's life.
It consists of five sections:
II A Game of Chess focuses on the contrast between the squalor of the present and the splendour of the past;
III The Fire Sermon represents the alienation of the present through a loveless sexual encounter;
I The Burial of the Dead concerns the opposition between life and death;
IV Death by Water reinforces the idea of a spiritual shipwreck;
V What the Thunder Said depicts a possible solution in a kind of sympathy with other human beings.
Themes
The poet uses images from historical narratives linked by main themes:
The collapse of civilisation
The despair of living in an alienated modern world.
The contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the sterility of the present;
The speaking voice is linked to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time.
The mythical method
he mythical past appears in quotations in many literary works.
This use of quotations is linked to Eliot's concept of history:
classicism = the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present;
poetic culture = a living unity of all poems written in different eras.
concept of history = the repetition of the same events;
In Waste Land, the present and the past exist simultaneously.
Shifts in time and space are created by the free associations of ideas and thoughts.
Style
Quotations from different languages and literary works
Repetition of words, images and phrases used to increase musicality.
Technique of implication
Use of the objective correlative and juxtaposition. For Eliot, the 'objective correlative' = the use of a sequence of events to express a certain emotion and evoke it in the reader.
Mixture of different poetic styles reproducing the chaos of modern civilisation.
I section the burial of the dead
Contrast between past and present: the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage and the clashes of the First World War.
The episode ends with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal
The setting: London, populated by the ghosts of the dead.