T. S. Eliot is the most important poet of modernism and wrote The Waste Land, and it is dedicated symbolically to Europe. Eliot used different languages for example Sanskrit, Latin, German and French. Besides he used the dramatic monologue and the reader has the impression to listen the voice of individual monologue because it creates the same effect of drama. Besides the speaking voice pretends to express his most intimate feelings and pretends nobody can listen him. The dramatic monologue was introduced in poetry by the Victorian poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning.

Besides the text has not a coherent structure because it is fragmentary. And the reader is disappointed because you expect an organized poem for example with feelings and narrative sequences.

I The Burial of the Dead

Eliot dedicated the Waste Land to Ezra Pound.

At the beginning:

Del resto la Sibilla a Cuma l’ho vista anch’io con I miei occhi penzolare dentro un’ampolla e quando i fanciulli le chiedevano: “Sibilla che vuoi?” lei rispondeva “ Voglio morire”.

Sybille were virgin and priestesses of Apollo and they can make responses and predictions.

Reading the title I can say Eliot refers to Europe because it is exit from the World War I and it is destroyed.

April refers to spring in which nature usually sprouts, but in the poem nature is dead. Therefore there is an antithesis between fertility and sterility. Besides lilacs is connected to spring because it is a flower, but it is also connected to dead because it is the colour of priest’s dress of the funeral. The term us means the speaking voice and his conscience. Besides snow refers to protection of plants and human being. And tubers do not feed because the nature is dead.

In addition Starnbergersee refers to water and in particular to death in water. Eliot underlines the antithesis of death and life because he deals with spring that does not give birth to nature. Then he refers to cosmopolitan characters because they live in place where it is snowing, therefore they go to south. It means that people shelter themselves from winter, but that refers to shortage of energy to face life. In addition roots refers also to protection like colonnade and snow. Therefore the poem refers to land of Europe that was desolated by the war and the loss of values. Nobody can regenerate Europe as spring can not regenerate nature.

In addition red rock is a reference to sterility of earth in opposition to fertility and there is a reference to sloth that means people’s inactivity, because the poet invites people to react. Besides it is a sin and belongs to Christian code. Subsequently a handful of dust refers to funeral, because following Christian tradition a human being is dust and will return dust. Besides there is a reference to a Romantic love by a sailor who loves his woman, but he does not say her his love and to the hyacinth girl. Hyacinths are a symbol of fertility and they are in opposition to sterility of earth and dust. Another symbol of fertility is full which means wealth. While sterility is represented by absence to react for example I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence.

After upside down of seasons T. S. Eliot offers a further desolation scenery and it is dealt with people’s description.

They seem ghosts and they create an unreal city (financial and business destruction). Besides there is a reference to death, because it is foggy and the dominant colour is grown. That means people’s inability to see and people have not an identity. In addition people are described like coming from death and it is a reference to Dante’s Inferno. As a matter of fact the speaking voice says “a crowd flowed over London Bridge” and “sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled”.

Besides people suffer from spiritual sloth because they do not react. In addition people are described as if they are all guilty , because they do not see in the eyes “and each man fixed his eyes before his feet”. Elements of city are described and the reader can give details to them.

“To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours” there is a reference to time and it is a constant allusion of modernist poetry and the reader can hear the sound of bells. But in the following line the chronological time is destroyed, because there is a reference to Mylae where the Romans and the Carthaginians made the first Punic War. The time of the text is not tidy and chronological, but the time of consciousness.

Besides there are references to other poets, because people believe in something, but they do not follow the nature, because nature does not give regeneration.

V. What the Thunder Said

The text refers to an Indian myth in which the Lord of the Creation communicates through the thunder.

The text presents a place that is desolated and arid in opposition to water.

In addition the speaking voice associated narrative texts and symbols for example myths and intertextual quotations: the journey to Emmaus of Jesus; the incoming to the Perilous Chapel and the Europe decline.

The speaking voice refers to an infernal situation, because there is aridity and no water

“ sweat is dry and feet are in the sand” and it is connected to the unreal city of London and “dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit”. People suffer and find difficult to go up the mountain, because there is sterility of earth “but dry sterile thunder without rain” and “ from doors of mudcracked houses” … In addition the speaking voice underlines the absence of water and the onomatopoeic sound of water recalls to the reader the sound of water. The journey of the people through the mountain is connected to the journey through the desert of the Apostles to Emmaus. At the end people do not find safety.

The Waste Land is connected to anthropology and in particular to James Fraser who write The Golden Bough, he puts his attention on mythology, pre-history which have origin from the Darwin’s theories. And art is a unconscious product that has result by collective imagination. That is people are subjected to stimulus of society. In addition Fraser discussed the ancient myth of the Grail and he refers to Alfred Tennyson’s who Idylss of the King in which there are primeval customs, fertility rituals and so on. Besides the text is connected to Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance in which she made a synthesis of the historical and geographical scenery behind medieval Grail legend.

Eliot’s mythical method

Eliot considers myth and ritual, because they give an order, a transformation, a shape and a significance to a world of futility and anarchy which is contemporary society. Their technical function is to have a symbolical meaning.

Eliot considers not only the symbolical meaning, but also their technical function and his technique is compression and allusion and they are based on myth.

In the 1923 Eliot made a review of Joyce’s Ulysses. It is formed by a parallelism between contemporaneity and antiquity that is Ulysses of Odyssey and Ulysses of contemporaneity. For example the first has values, the second not; the Ulysses’ wife is faithful the other not.

Eliot’s objective correlative

Eliot believes to a particular formula or object creating a relation between that is said and the emotion that is felt. For example Eliot criticizes Hamlet by W. Shakespeare, because there is not unity and there is a discrepancy and a strain, because the experience is overwhelmed by words. But in the Lady Macbeth in the speech of Macbeth when he knows of his wife’s death words are adequate.