THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

• He was an innovator. He experimented a new kind of poetry (innovator like Picasso, Joyce)

• He didn’t like Romantic poetry with its cult of the poetic personality ( the idea that poetry should be subjective)- Art isn’t the result of the individual genius. Art is created out of tradition. In TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT (1919) He wrote ‘ no poet , no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists….’

• He revalued the importance of tradition, since past and present coexist and the past is an active part of the present

• He also rejected the idea that poetry should just deal with nature or natural elements.

• He highlighted the importance of “unpoetic” things and situations (e.g.coffee-spoons, an etherized patient)

• The nature of modern society needs an OBJECTIVE and IMPERSONAL art.

• Poetry should represent the complexities and fragmentation of modern society. Our world is totally  broken with no shared ethical beliefs, characterized by a massive process of industrialization, whose main effects are mass production and consumerism. Man himself is morally and spiritually DEAD.

• The present is marked by futility and sterility (sense of emptiness, corruption, lack of communication, meaninglessness of life, no shared moral values)

• As a result, poetry will be complex as well. It must not be “easy”, but difficult and intricate.

• The poet’s task is to put together this broken world by creating a new SYMBOLIC SYSTEM

• He advocates the use of the MYTHICAL METHOD. In ULYSSES, ORDER AND MYTH(1923) he says that Joyce was trying to find ‘ a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility, and anarchy which is contemporary history…..instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method’

• He was under the influence of Imagism, whose leading artist EZRA POUND he greatly admired. For him the new poetry needed a new poetic language in order to convey a more fluid, uneven and less patterned kind of reality. From Ezra Pound he took the idea of using clear , precise images, using the minimum number of words

(In a Station of the Metro By Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.)

• He takes significant fragments about the Western past and he merges them with those of other cultures.
  

• He juxtaposes past and present in the belief that the present draws its substance from the living past

• The past is marked by fertility-the mythical past is characterized by legends and myths which contained a sense of moral and spiritual unity

•  He uses a lot of association of images, religious allusions, references to literary works, cultural sources, ancient rituals, mythical events, quotations

• His images are fragmented and sometimes repeated–they want to reproduce the chaos of modern civilization

• Especially in the first phase he discarded all traditional metres, using either free verse or a combination of different poetic styles, rhythms and metres ( the ode, the quatrain, free verse….)

• He claims the importance of the so-called OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE. He wrote that ‘the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative, in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, shall be the formula of that particular emotion…..’ ,in other words his emotions should be represented through something-  a landscape, a season, a particular mythical figure, so that the reader may correlate it or them with particular emotions

THE WASTE LAND

Here he investigates the problem of human condition and tries to find some meaning in life.

There’s no plot in this long poem. It’s not a narrative poem.

It’s neither dramatic nor lyrical

There ‘s a sequence of images, apparently unconnected, but linked to each other by the technique of association of ideas

Sources

• The Golden Bough by James Frazer. He provided information about primitive myths and fertility rites  and sacrificial rituals to grant the continuing cycle of the seasons
• The Bible, especially the death and resurrection of Christ
• The legend of the Arthurian fisher king and The quest for the holy grail.  In a kingdom called the Waste Land, the ruler, the Fisher king, has been sexually maimed and, as a consequence, the country lies under a terrible curse, all sources dry up and the whole land becomes sterile. Water lacks everywhere. The curse can only be lifted by the arrival of a stranger , who, however, must know the meaning of the Grail symbols. The stranger arrives and starts on his quest for the Holy Grail, but in the end he fails. Eliot considers our modern world as a Waste Land as much as the Fisher king’s kingdom
• Sanskrit writings
• Elizabethan quotations
• Metaphysical poetry, especially  John Donne
• The symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Verlaine  
• Dante's Divina Commedia       
• Quotations from philosophy, religion, human thought

THEMES

The meaningful link with the past. The past is a mythical past and a historical past. The past often merges with the present and makes it look even more squalid and lifeless

• The emptiness and sterility of modern life
• The sterility is natural, social and spiritual.
• The land is dry, rocky, polluted, unfruitful

People find it difficult to communicate and are unable to love

People no longer  believe in religious values and in Christ

So only through rain, love and faith will our modern waste land be saved and restored to fertility

A difficult poem -Why?

• The lack of explicit links between the episodes described
• The language used
• The presence of sentences and quotations from other languages

The Burial of the Dead

The first part is about the coming of spring in a sterile land.

The title is referred to a funeral service in the Anglican rite called “The Order of the Burial of the Dead”.

We usually think of spring as a time of love, re-birth and regeneration. Here the poet  refers to the starting lines of the General Prologue taken from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where spring is seen as the start of a new life.

However, in these lines the speaker says that instead of spring being the best time of year, "Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow" (5-6). Existing is painful, so generating new life is cruel. Winter is  good, because it covers the earth and keeps what is underneath warm.The verb “Covering” suggests the concealment of truth. Therefore, winter is hidding the truth, which is underneath. The speaker suggests that society doesn’t want the truth to be revealed, people like winter.“ Mixing memory and desire” suggests that even any act of remembrance and desire is seen as painful. The juxtaposition of the nouns "Memory" and "desire" also makes the reader understand an additional feature of Eliot's literature: past("memory") and future(desire") co-exist together in one dimension, along with the present.

This description of winter contradicts traditional views about winter. Here it turns to be positive. It allows men to live in peace and forgetful.

He uses some verbs in the ing form: “Breeding” “Mixing” “Stirring” “Feeding”. They have connotations of growing and birth, maybe a kind of rebirth of humanity.The words are hidden at the end of the line suggesting there is hope for rebirth, but it is only hinted at the ends of the lines.

The speakers are two.( I  , we  “ us” )

The second part is about the degradation of life in the city. Here there are some references to time “ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn”, “ a dead sound on the final stroke of 9” and some references to place “ over London bridge, up the hill and down King William Street ....Saint Mary Woolnoth”and to the inhabitants of the city” A crowd, so many.....Sighs, short and infrequent, each man fixed his eyes before his feet flowed up....” and other characters “One I knew”.

“Unreal City" symbolizes London city, this is also an allusion taken from Baudelaire’s poem in which this phrase refers to Paris

The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over London Bridge like zombies, and says he "had not thought death had undone so many" (Ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta, Canto 3). Here, Eliot is definitely talking about the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno  and is comparing modern life to living in hell.

The people in this scene are also sighing and staring (more Inferno allusions from Canto 4) only at the ground in front of their feet. They seem completely unsatisfied with their undead lives. The city is crowded but at the same time, the people are isolated.

Those people are probably office workers in the City. They are marked by the inability of communicating and they live a situation of death within life. Death is everywhere and society is destroyed,  there is a reference to the First World War and to the collapse of Europe that it brought.

Stetson is a character the speaker sees by Saint Mary Woolnoth. He already knows him. They have probably fought together in the First Punic War, which according to Eliot’s idea of history, seems to reflect  the recent past of the First World War. In other words, the main idea is that all wars are equal because history is the repetition of the same events.Stetson may be a veteran of the Great War.

The speaker asks him if the "corpse [he] planted last year in [his] garden" has begun to sprout"

Normally, we think of burying the dead in order to get them out of sight. But this speaker is so weird that he thinks planting a body in the ground is like planting a seed that's supposed to grow. The speaker then gives  Stetson some advice about keeping the dog and the frost away from where the corpse is planted. What does it mean?

Here we can find a comparison between the modern rituals of office workers with their daily “rituals” and ancient fertility rites. 
In the past, images of the gods were buried in the ground or thrown into water to ensure the coming of a new spring. Here, the image refers both to the routine of gardening and to the new man that may be born from the death of the old one. 
Also, the idea of the sprouting corpse seems a grotesque parody of Brooke’s image of the soldier being buried in a foreign country (in The Soldier), where through his death he’ll help make England greater and nobler.

The speaker also mentions a landmark street in London, and notes how a church bell (of a real church—St Mary Woolnoth) lets out a "dead sound on the final stroke of nine" There the poet again associates religion and death. 

The beginning of work in the City (final stroke of nine), the beginning of work in the morning is bounded to death (a dead sound of the final stroke), life in contemporary society is similar to death according to the speaker.

In the final lines he's alluding to John Webster's The White Devil, which contains the same lines. However,  the word wolf is replaced by dog and the word foe by friend. The Dog is written in capital letters because it may be the guardian of the dead, it avoids re birth or coming back to life.

 The Dog is the friend of men but man tends to stop him before he digs: he is the friend of men because he permits nature, a corpse, knowledge to surface but the winter snow keeps men warm and they do not want it to be removed by the corpse, tubers, knowledge.

His final words are from Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, a poem published in 1857. The reader is called “mon semblable,mon frere”…the reader shares the poet’s same destiny. In other words, the speaker personally blames the reader,  himself, and almost  everybody for what's happened.

Modern man is spiritually hollow and barren; he is just like a robot that follows the pre-assigned tasks. He wakes up early in the morning, changes his dress, has  his breakfast, goes to office, …he follows the same routine. Modern man lives in a  Waste land, although he has gained progress in science and materialistic culture, yet he has no values, he is spiritually dead.