Scarica Thomas Stearns Eliot, the waste land e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (1888 – 1965) Modernist poetry Thomas Eliot was born into a British middle-class family. He was educated in the United State but then worked in England. In 1927 he becomes a member of the Anglican Church. 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. During his life, he was poet, dramatist and literary critic. His main works are The sacred wood: essay on poetry and criticism (1920), The waste land (1922), Murder in the cathedral (1935) and Four quartets (1945). THE WASTE LAND 1922 This book is the result of Eliot’s post-war crisis and the individual self-confessions he made. For this reason, in this novel we found the topics of sterility, the rejection of life and breakdowns. Writing The waste land, Eliot was inspired from The golden Bough by James Frazer (who talks about the vegetation and fertility rites) and From ritual to romance by Jassie Weston (who talks about the Holy Grail). For this, Eliot writes also about death and resurrection. In this book, the objective correlative is explained through an anonymous unidentifiable speaker (such as in Shakespeare, Dante and Baudelaire). Eliot wanted also to report the crises of western civilization, that brought to a loss of desire and a spiritual apathy. It’s written in free verses with variable style. The first section, “The Burial of the Dead,”is made up of four short passages. Against the conventions of the dramatic monologue, each is delivered by a different narrator. The first passage is delivered by a highborn woman. She describes her life, painting a bleak picture of monotony and repetition, structured by discussion of the seasons, in which even spring is made sinister and where, famously, “April is the cruelest month.”The second passage describes a more literal waste land of “stony rubbish,” and “broken images” in which the narrator cannot find any sign of life or hope of relief. This bleak land is juxtaposed with memories from childhood about a “hyacinth girl” and with extracts of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The third passage describes a clairvoyant reading from a deck of cards that largely contains invented, non-tarot cards. The narrator of the forth passage describes moving through a London that has become an “unreal city” populated by ghosts. Among them, the narrator recognizes someone he knew from the devastating Battle of Mylae during the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage (used here to echo the devastation of the First World War). The narrator asks him if the corpse he planted in his garden has begun to sprout and bloom, but no response is given. The second section, “A Game of Chess,” begins with a description of another highborn woman, seated on a throne-like chair in a lavish room. Among the furnishings is a tapestry showing a scene from a Greek myth in which Philomela is raped by King Tereus. The passage describes this briefly before returning to the seated woman.A brief exchange follows, possibly between the woman and the narrator, in which the woman complains of bad nerves and panics about sounds, ceaselessly asking the narrator anxious questions. In contrast to the woman’s decadent room, the second part of the section takes place in a London bar, with a repeated refrain from the landlord telling customers to hurry up because
