Thomas Stearns Eliot, the most celebrated 20th century poet in English literature, was born in St Louis, Missouri, but in his mid twenties he fled America, and a career in philosophy at the university of Harvard, to move to England where married (disastrously) and, encouraged by the American poet Ezra Pound, decided to launch his career as a poet. By 1921 his wife Vivien's illness, both physical and mental, and their unhappy marriage, brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown and he had to convalesce first at Margate, on the coast of Kent, then in a sanatorium in Lausanne. Two moths later he returned and gave Ezra Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land, the most revolutionary poem of its time, a devastating vision of modern civilisation. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
The Waste Land is a complex, erudite and cryptic poem which consists of five sections ("The Burial of the Dead", "A Game of Chess", "The Fire Sermon", "Death by Water", "What the Thunder Said") all accompanied by Eliot's own "notes" which explain his many varied and multicultural allusions, quotations. The poem also makes reference to the legend of the Holy Grail, to the ancient vegetation myths and fertility ceremonies analysed by Frazer in The Golden Bough, the death and resurrection of Christ, the story of the Fisher King, a variety of mythological and religious material and prophetic figures, such as the Greek Sybil, Ezekiel, Buddha and Tiresias, the blind Greek prophet who was both man and woman.
The Waste Land open with a quotation from Petronius' Satyricon. It has got the function of epigraph. It is in Greek and so implies the origin of western culture, even if before the Christian times. The Sybille is one who knows the past, the reset and the future. The quotation that Eliot Choose is that one where one asked to Cuma Sybille what she wants and she answered that she wants to die.
Then there is a dedication in Italian: Per Ezra Pound, il migior fabbro.
The title of the first section referrers to the Anglican burial service. This section introduces all the central images and the main themes of the poem.
April as the cruellest month is an intertextual quotation: Eliot took the first line of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was the first poet who used English as a literary language. Quoting Chaucer means go to the origins.
April is the cruellest month because instead of generate roses it generates lilacs, the flowers of death.
At line 8 the scene change: the sun brings dryness and the absence of water makes the land dead. Water is a substance, a way (in church especially) to purify.
Madame Sosostris is a fortune-teller. She symbolized the human being coarseness.
Milazzo is the place of an important naval battle occurred in 260 BC between the Romans and Carthaginians. It was a crucial moment. The Romans conquered the Carthaginians barbarians. In 204 BC the Romans adopted an East cult to follow a prophecy. Civilisation can live only if they are inclusive.
City is the city inside London, the financial statement district.
People going to work seems like a series of walking dead. They are taken from the hustle do not arrive in time.
As in "The Love Song of J. A. Prufrock" the road is muffled by the fog, that is a metaphor for confusion, because if it is foggy you can not see well.
The fertile classical western culture is dying. Death is a central concept. Another central concept is consciousness.
Eliot uses language on a multilayer dimension, making reference to nature also on the inner dimension of the individual.
The technique used is he technique of juxtaposition of scenes. This create a dramatic effect.