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Overview
The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence ("I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter"). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader "something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust" (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines).
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781500216481 |
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Publisher: | CreateSpace Publishing |
Publication date: | 06/01/1922 |
Pages: | 24 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.05(d) |
About the Author
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a British poet of American descent. Born in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent family from Boston, Eliot was raised in a religious and intellectual household. Childhood ailments left Eliot isolated for much of his youth, encouraging his interest in literature. At the age of ten, he entered a preparatory school where he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. During this time, he also began writing poetry. From 1906 to 1909, he studied at Harvard University, earning a Master of Arts in English literature and introducing himself to the poetry of the French Symbolists. Over the next several years, he studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit at the Harvard Graduate School before attending Oxford on a scholarship to Merton College. Tiring of academic life, however, he abandoned his studies and moved to London, where he met the poet Ezra Pound. With Pound’s encouragement and editing, Eliot published such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and “The Waste Land” (1922), works that earned him a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s leading poets and a major figure in literary Modernism. Living in England with his wife Vivienne—from whom he would separate in 1932—Eliot worked as a prominent publisher for Faber and Faber, working with such poets as W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes. He converted to Anglicanism in 1927, an event that inspired his poem “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) and led to the composition of his masterpiece Four Quartets (1943). Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Table of Contents
Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 14
The Story Behind the Story 19
List of Characters 22
Summary and Analysis 26
Critical Views 53
Eleanor Cook on Maps of The Waste Land 53
Louis Menand on Nineteenth Century Style 57
Sandra M. Gilbert on Eliot's Mourning of a Friend 68
Michael Levenson on Eliot's Views of Postwar London 74
Juan A. Suarez on the Meaning of the Gramophone 85
Shawn R. Tucker on Anxiety in The Waste Land 89
Thomas Dilworth on Sex Between the Typist and the Young Man 94
Camelia Elias and Bent Soerensen on the Influence of Ovid 97
Works by T.S. Eliot 101
Annotated Bibliography 103
Contributors 105
Acknowledgments 108
Index 110
What People are Saying About This
Anthony Burgess
The Waste Land remains the best manifesto of modernism in poetry a triumph of concision, eloquence, colloquialism, symbolism, cinematic cutting, collage of existing literature as well as popular song, all in the service of a kind of purgatorial philosophy, civilization was decaying, man was growing impotent, salvation lay in the injunctions of a Sanskrit Upanishad: "Give, sympathize, control." (Anthony Burgess, from One Man's Chorus)
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