Scarica Riassunto sull'autore inglese Elliot e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE WASTE LAND The central modernist. The “Waste Land” is perhaps the central work in the modernist tradition and the one which most decidedly carries poetry into the 20th century, leaving late Victoria. Modes behind. Its influence on contemporary and future poets has been immense and even those writers who have not followed Elliot’s method have had to come to terms with it, if only to deliberately choose other themes and techniques. The poem is divided into five sections: - “The Burial of the Dead - “A Game of Chees” - “The Fire Sermon” - “Death by Water” - “What the Thunder Said” Cultural and spiritual sterility. “The Waste Land” is considered by many as the most important poem of the 20th century. It successfully expresses the modern artist’s disillusion with the modern world and, at the same time, the desperate need and search for new tradition. Il also represents the culmination of the first phase in Elliot’s career, which may be called nihilistic. The poet sees only ruins and desolation around him and is concerned with aspects of the decay of western civilization that followed World War I. “The Waste Land” cannot be reconstructed into a coherent, logically ordered narrative or massage: the images are juxtaposed not logically ordered. The fragmentation of the poem is a reflection of the fragmentation of contemporary culture, in which each individual must try to find a personal ordering or interpretation. The central metaphor of the poem is the spiritual dryness and sterility of modern life, the death of western culture through a lack of any belief, religious or other, that can give meaning to everyday existence. The mythical structure of the poem. To express this theme “The Waste Land” brings together images of modern decadence with images, echoes and quotations from ancient myths and legends. Since these stories and myths are not always known to the average reader, Eliot himself referred his readers to Sir James Frazer’s monumental study of pagan myths and fertility rites, “The Golden Bough” (1890), and to a book by Jessie L. Weston, “From Ritual to Romance” (1920), which relates ancient fertility myths and rites to the rituals of early Christianity, and then to the medieval romances of the Holy Grail. In these romances we see a waste land whose ruler, the Fisher King, has brought sterility to the land because of his impotence or death. Seen together, the many references to sterility and fertility provide a framework for all the various fragments of poem. The order of myth is thus projected on to the chaos of modern life. Eliot’s method. The structure, or lack of traditional structure, of “The Waste Land” is modernist: its five unequal sections show no realistic or logical continuity. The time-shifts and the lack of a narrative sequence reveal Eliot’s “stream- of-consciousness” technique, based on free association of thoughts in the human mind. Eliot uses quotations from or allusion to thirty-five writers, in six languages, as well as frequent allusions to various philosophical and religious traditions. The use of a medieval poet like Dante to express something fundamental to modern sensibility, for example, is typical: the crowds flowing over London Bridge at the end of “The Burial pf the Dead” are modelled on the crowds of damned souls in Dante’s “Inferno”. The metrical pattern too reflects the poem’s variety: lines vary in length and rhythm, and would seem to be a form of free verse, although there are some regularities and rhymes.
