Unreal city- analysis

In the present text I’m going to analyze the “Unreal City”, a section of “The Waste Land”.

“The Waste Land” is a poem written by T.S. Eliot in 1922 and it consists of 5 sections, each one specially titled and created by the juxtaposition of scenes.
The title immediately sets the atmosphere, indeed the word “waste” provokes a sense of desolation and invites to think about a sterile land. The title is symbolic for all the poem, indeed the word “waste” identifies the central theme, which is the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man during the 19th century after the WWI and the crisis of values.

Unreal city includes lines from 60 to 76 and it has a very concrete setting: the city, considered unreal, is a district of London and it is pictured in an early foggy winter morning. The fog is metaphorical of something that cannot be seen clearly, something confused.
Eliot describes a scene of “a crowd” that “flowed over London Bridge”, each man’s eyes “fixed before his feet”. It reminds to Dante’s description of masses crowding toward the gates of hell and the idea of people fixing their eyes before their feet reminds to the idea of guilt, which is also connected to Dante’s Inferno. Even the expression “sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled” reminds to death.
People are described as a crowd, a mass without identity who walks through the unreal city like robots or zombies.
Then, the writer recognizes a man named Stetson, probably his friend Ezra Pound, and reminds him about the battle of Milarvo, during the Second Punic War , symbolic for the WWI.
Time is simultaneous, typical of modernist writers, and here T. S. Eliot shows his intent to talk to all human-genre, writing so a universal poem.
Moving on, the speaker asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden was grown or not - recalling, once more, the idea of death and fertility.

The unreal city can be easily compared with Charles Dickens’ Coketown, city full of pollution, described by colors which reminded to Hell (red, black…) where people and buildings looked all alike. A city where reigned monotony and where people, described as robots, have lost their personality and individuality. It represented the alienation caused by industrialization, but compared with the Unreal city it also represents men the after crisis of values.