INTRODUCTION TO MODERNIST POETRY
T.S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND

What is innovative in Eliot’s poetry? 
We are going to analyse an extract taken from a poem. The poem’s title is The waste land and it was written in 1922. 1922 is considered an admirable years for the English literature because of the relevant publishing of the period.
The poem consists of 434 lines arranged in five sections. The first one is The burial of the death. The poem is so difficult and symbolical that it is still being translated. 
The term “waste” makes the reader think about an arid, brown, empty, non-productive, endless land. The intelligent reader wonder why the land is considered waste and how it became like that.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound, considered the best “fabbro” (craftsman) by the poet. According to Ezra Pound, images may take the place of a thousand words. Though the term image suggests a thing seen, when speaking of images in poetry we generally mean a word or sequence of words that refers to any sensory experience. 
The poem starts with a dedication addressed to Ezra. The epigraph is taken from Petronio’s Satyricon (I b.C.), and the most relevant quotation is taken from Greek language: “after all, I saw the Sibyl in Cuma too with my own eyes, dangling inside an ampoule, and when the children asked them: « Sibyl, what do you want?» she answered: «I want to die!»”. 
Right from the start the intelligent reader who reads between the lines understand that the quotation expresses the desire to die, indeed the title’s first section is “The burial of the death”: so the death is the setting point. 

The poem consists in lists of dramatic monologues. The reader can listen to different voices. It is constituted by the juxtaposition of scenes, the first of which we analysed and was concerned of spring. The way Eliot speaks seems to be paradoxical. 
April brings the promise of rebirth and that’s why the poet defines it cruel: it didn’t bring any promises in the contemporary age of the poet. T.S. Eliot had read the Canterbury tales by G. Chaucer, where in the prologue April is said to be the sweetest month, not the cruellest one. Eliot goes back to Chaucer because he’s the poet’s poet: he was the first one to use English language as a literature one in the European tradition.
It’s unusual to consider April the cruellest month, indeed it’s the month of the blossom of the flowers, the temperature starts to rise, it’s often sunny, etc. Eliot is turning the traditional vision of that month upside down. April brings lilacs out of the land, which is dead and lifeless. Lilacs’ colour is purple, the color of the priest’s dress during the celebration of a funeral: we find the theme of death again. Also speaking about winter is paradoxical, because the poet turns the vision of winter upside down: he tells reader that winter kept us warm, which is the opposite of what people think. People remain in the close space of their houses, which is a protective space. The outside world is felt as frightening, winter covers earth (the all globe) with snow, which is defined forgetful: snow leaves outside all of our memories. Also winter feeds our lives which are said to be little lives: it underlines the tragic conditions of human beings during the period of the first world war, when people suffered spiritually because they didn’t find any realistic point of reference. They lost all their certainties (Nietzsche with the death of God, Darwin with the natural selection, …) and this created a vacuum, as if the sense of life couldn’t revive. So the intelligent reader understands why Eliot recovers Chaucer: Chaucer was a Middle Age’s poet. Middle Age was a positive period because people had stable points of reference (and all of them turned around religion and the concept of paradise). 
The waste land is an extended metaphor to refer to the entire world of that period: it is compared to dried tubers, so it suggests a sense of sterility, like a big and waste land that doesn’t give any product and doesn’t give people support. 
The intelligent reader creates a relation between the objects (snow, land, tubers, …) with the idea of sterility. All the first part of the poem works on the opposition between sterility and fertility. All human beings of that period are conditioned by a spiritual and ideological sterility: they are living a life that seems dead (death in life). He wants to understand if for the earth it is possible an emotional and spiritual regeneration. Snow, land, tubers are objects that convey the idea of sterility, even if people look for fertility. The lessical items contribute to create the atmosphere of a waste land, which is symbol of a little life, in which men have no desires. They only ask themselves what should they do to change their condition (Eliot makes the reader reflect indeed this is a real modern theme: we are all part of a waste land).
The sequence is not resected: spring, winter, summer. Summer surprises us (alliteration of s: the poets asks for silence) because human beings aren’t even able to recognize the season because everything is dried, similar, death. “We” is an inclusive pronounce: the dramatis personae is connected with the reader. 
The voice that is speaking in the dramatic monologue refers to a moment when his consciousness finds himself in a lake in Munich. The lake is the place where a mad king whose name was Ludwig II had died inside water. 
People realize that summer arrived because of a shower of rain and this forced them to search a repair. When the water changed the sun came and they hang out in the public park in Munich. In the scene about summer the voice of the dramatic monologue find himself in Munich with somebody else. There he had a coffee with someone and talked for hours.
Eliot wrote some verses using the image of the seasons’cycle. He used the lines of Chaucer in a paradoxical way, returning to the beginnings of English literature. Realizing that the world is devastated by the spiritual loss of values, he wants to see if there is a possibility for man to regenerate. The choice of the season’s cycle is due to anthropology study of the author: he discovered that primitive people, if they needed anything, exploited the so-called vegetation rites. There were also legends related to these rituals, legends that for illiterate people had a symbolic meaning: for ex. the legend of the drowned dead fisher king.
Eliot uses references from all Western and especially European culture, in each section of the work. One of the legends that has most influenced literature in general is the legend of the Holy Grail (the cup that collects the blood taken from the wound on a side of Jesus Christ crucified). In this desolate land there are human beings who decide to tackle a climb, like pilgrims. They’re in a completely arid territory (so much that the ground is red and marked by cracks). The pilgrims must reach a chapel, where the cup of the sacred Grail is located. They pass through this arid environment with great difficulty (it is uphill, there is no water, ...) and they are about to die suffocated. What they desire the most is obviously water and they keep asking for it. In the legend water becomes a symbol of fertility. Water is the objective correlative of all Eliot’s poetry. The objective correlative is a peculiar literature characteristic used by Eliot, which he defined as a way of expressing emotions: the language refers to objects that transmit an emotion to the reader (formula able to make the reader feels the same emotion). So: the object correlative is a series of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which will give the formula of a particular emotion. The two objective correlatives concerning the waste land are fertility and sterility.In semantic terms they are represented by water and rock. King Ludwig II gives the idea of ​​death by water, which gives the idea of ​​regeneration, because water allows the earth to become fertile. In order to hold together the fragments T.S. Eliot uses a myth that he takes from Jessie Waston, who used the fisher king's report in her text “From ritual to romance”. It is a figure that recurs in many fertility rituals in primitive cultures.
The author has collected a lot of data to understand if his intuition was true or not: is there a continuity between the primitive vegetation rites and the church of today? 
He uses kind of poetry in respect to the poetry he had read so far: the new one is made by the juxtaposition of scenes that has no apparent coherence with others. What keeps all the scenes together is the use of myth: he takes the vegetation’s rites of primitive cultures and uses them to create a frame that holds the scenes together. He mainly uses the report of the King of fish, a figure that occurs in many myths about fertility. This king lives in a land that has been cursed and is now sterile. There is an analogy with the king who governs that land: the king has an illness, a wound in the scrotum, which prevents him from having children. Even old age made him sterile. He can overcome impotence only when a foreigner will be able to answer a ritual question. The rituals are metaphors that symbolize that man is not able to regenerate.

UNREAL CITY
There is an additional language: the French one. The quotation in French is from the nineteenth century: it comes from Baudelaire. He includes the reader with him and places himself on his own level. Readers and so the poet are inept, anti-heroes, unsatisfied.
T.S. Eliot is juxtaposing a scene, which is different from the others. The setting is London, and precisely the district of business: Westminster. It is 9 o'clock in the morning when people commuters are going to work and they are coming out of the underground. They have just taken off their train. The city looks unreal, something that has no realistic features.
T.S. Eliot conveys the idea of an unreal city: it’s autumn or winter, the scene is set at dawn, it is very foggy. The weather conditional makes the city unreal, especially the foggy, that prevents to see properly. The natural elements describe a season making references to metaphorical aspects: people can’t see reality. The crowd makes everybody similar, so their identities are lost (cock town: people are all the same, so the sense of alienation of Dickens is even here). The semantic choice of the crow means that they look like a spot, they are so many that the poet uses the verb flow (a verb that is generally used for the rivers). 
T.S. Eliot takes a quotation from Dante: “Si lunga tratta di gente ch’io non avrei creduto che morte tanta non avesse disfatta (Dante canto 3)”. He creates continuity from the middle age and the contemporary age: I had not thought death had undone so many. We are like the condemned of Dante, Eliot thinks that we are all sinners (Eliot creates a parallelism: as the condemned go to the Acheron, the crowd leaves the subway). He takes verses from Dante connoting the people who go to work with the songs of hell.The poet thinks that the crowd who is going to work in the morning is living a life in death (they’re spiritually death). The people who go to work in the morning are the sons of the contemporary age, who has lost the values. In the middle ages the most important code was the religious one. T.S. Eliot chooses the verb “to exhale” instead of “to speak”, as if the life of these people was an existence on the verge of death, so people sigh laboriously and slowly. Eliot has chosen verses that reproduce a culture where there were still ethical, moral and religious principles. 
When people walk looking at their feet it means that they have no clear conscience or that they are very tired. They walk to the King William Street, which is near the London Bridge. They walked to the church of Santa Maria Woolnoth and heard the bells ringing 9 am. The ringing of bells is called dead, the last touch is sounding (the sound of the bell: tolling bells). Even the hour is an important element: at 9.00 a.m. clerks go to work, but the timetable has a symbolic importance: 3x3 = 9, and 9 is the perfect number. 3 represent the trinity. Jesus died at 9 am. 
D. H. Lorens wrote The ignoble procession: describes people who go to work in the morning and are without energy se they do not look at each other.
Eliot saw someone in the crowd: the poet seems to recognize someone in the crowd stops him and shouts to attract his attention. The poet makes a chronological “jump” between 1922 and 260 BC (battle of Milazzo: between Romans and Carthaginians, during the first Punic war). The reference is paradoxical because different temporal dimensions converge in a single perspective of co-presence and interaction, marked by the basic scheme of the transfer of fertility rites to the Grail legend and therefore to the contemporary scene: Eliot wants to make it clear that man is always the same regardless of historical age. It is the revitalization of time typical of the mythical method. Juxtaposing elements of different times and cultures Eliot makes it clear that there is continuity in human existence, which goes beyond chronological references.
Stetson was the brand of a cap that his friend Ezra Pound used.
The intelligent reader can understand the poet’s is about regeneration thanks to to the terms sprouting and blooming. Eliot than uses imperative in order to unite the dramatis personae to the reader, there is almost an inclusion: keep the dog away from the flowerbed that is friend of the men or with his nails he will dig up An element that unites the dramatis personae to the reader, there is almost an inclusion. Eliot gives these examples because the dog represents a transcoding of the White Devil by Webster ('600), which is a funeral song: Cornelia is the protagonist and cries over the body of the dead son saying “ keep the wolf away from here”. Eliot changed only one word: the wolf has become a dog, so the intelligent reader understands that in contemporary culture everything has depreciated.