The Waste Land: a critical view

the Waste Land’ In the autumn of 1921. And with the constructive suggestions of Ezra Pound about the structure of the poem ,the present draft of the poem , which was published in 1922, has become a classic. It is also, more Importantly, the symbol of a whole age, signifying a new kind of poetry and a poetic revolution In modern English Literature and culture. The poem Is a masterpiece of innovative poetic design and embodies an entirely new and original poetic technique.

Elite’s view that every generation should make a poem in its own image is to merely an aesthetically satisfying ‘raisin deter’ for the composition of ‘The Waste Land’, but [It] Is also a way of recognizing and placental deferent Interpretations of this great poem by succeeding generations who observe in its varying images their own predicament. F. R. Leaves has called it a poem -about the disillusionment of a generation’, and ‘a vision of dissolution and spiritual drought . L. R.

Richard has called The Waste Land’- ‘A music of Ideas’ that – the Ideas like musician’s phrases are arranged not that they may tell us something but that their effects on us may combine into a coherent whole of feeling and attitude. ‘ There are critics like Yamaha Lewis who finds ‘The Waste Land’- ‘a cross-word puzzle of synthetic literary chronology and ‘a spurious verbal algebra. ‘ It Is difficult to trace accurately the sources of The Waste Land’ to specific writing or works of Literature apart from well known origins such as Jussive Weston – ‘From Ritual to Romance 1920 and James Freezer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ 1922.

These two books have been identified by Eliot myself, along with a number of vegetation and fertility myths and rituals, especially those connected with ‘Taos, Adonis and Souris’. However, we do read the echoes of Ovoid’s – ‘Metamorphoses’, SST. Augustine ‘Confession’, Dent’s- ‘Inferno’ and ‘Propagator’, Baudelaire ‘Paris La Forge’s ‘City ,Hanger’s opera- ‘Tristan and Soled’, Chaucer and Spender’s writing , Shakespearean- ‘Antonym and Cleopatra’, and ‘The Tempest’, Million’s- ‘Paradise Lost’, Kid’s- ‘The Spanish tragedy, and Middleman’s- Woman Beware Woman’ etc. In The Waste Land’.

More over, the works of Ezra Pond. F. H. Bradley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Henry. James must have greatly Influenced Elite’s creative process. And, though Eliot largely drew his material from the Began and Christian sources, the Impact of the Rig Veda , the Pinheads , and Buddhism upon him cannot be overlooked. The poem is concluded with the parable of ‘Brickyard’s Punished’. Thus, The Waste Land’ consists of Fragments, as Eliot himself endorses the view- ‘These Fragments I have shored against my ruins’- of potentialities in an otherwise prosaic, dull and despairing world.

Eliot spoke tit the voice of a lonely prophet In a corrupt city, which reflects the post-war struggle for reorientation, immediate sense of ugliness, emptiness and aimlessness of man’s spiritual state of post-war years is responsible for the genesis of The Waste Land’. The deep sense of futility, horror and boredom of post-war generation Is rendered In a most difficult structure of the poem. Despite the erudite commentaries, ‘The Waste Land’ as a very complex poem gave the world a mild shock due to its extreme obscurity, a shock that had a curative effect to the war-crazy world. However, I OFF