NOTES OF 14^TH AND 30^TH MARCH, 3^RD APRIL 2012

The Waste Land

The Waste land is a poem written by T.S. Eliot and published in1922.

It is a dramatic monologue where the poet adopts a narrator whose voice does not coincide with the poet’s one, so the reader seems to read the narrating character’s opinion.

The title is a metaphor used by the author referring to the decay which is spreading in the western classical culture. Waste land refers to a desert and lonely place, where man hasn’t got the tools to live; this expression includes both the biologic aspect of land and the human nature’s one. T.S. Eliot focuses more closely on the human nature’s aspect of desolation, both culturally and morally.

On a first view, the poem appears as a collage of texts and languages, an apparently no sense conglomerate of cultural. The aim of Mr Eliot is to find an artistic arrangement to express the fragmentation of the society he lives in and all the emotions arising from that situation.

So use of a fragmentary poetry, formed by disconnected scenes and parts which are hold together by the same atmosphere of the whole composition, is aimed to convey the sense of disintegration inside the western society which is composed by a union of different cultures coming from the collapse of every single culture.

The poem starts with a quotation of Greek language:

“I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her ‘What do you want?’ She answered: ‘I want to die’.

It is an epigraph reporting the words of the Cumaean Sybil who said she wanted to die. The Cumaean Sibyl was the most famous of the Sibyls, the prophetic old women of Greek mythology: she had been granted immortality by Apollo, but because she forgot to ask for perpetual youth, she shrank into withered old age and her authority declined.  

The quotation is taken from Petronio’s Satyricon, from the Cena Trimalchionis scene, where the landlord Trimalchione wants to exhibit his own cultural knowledge but showing just his ignorance.

As the Satyricon had been a report of the decay in the Roman cultural, with the same purpose Mr Eliot uses Trimalchione’s quotation to give a hint to understand the decline of the modern age culture.

The quotation is followed by the dedication in the Italian language: Eliot dedicates his poem to Ezra Pound, called by him “Il miglior fabbro” (The better craftsman).

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is considered the poet most responsible for defining a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry featured by stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and traditional rhyme and meter in order to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.

Mr Eliot dedicates his composition to him because Ezra Pound was one of the most significant people which whom Eliot had come into contact and Ezra pound had read The Waste Land in its manuscript form and he suggested Eliot to cut some of the poem parts. The parts that Ezra pound cut were the most narrative.

Indeed a feature of modernist literature is the reduction of the plot to the minimum.