World War I

T.S. Eliot's work, The Waste Land is a very complex work which coverfs many subjects on several different levels, but the theme of a human as well as an early "waste land' run through the entire work. The setting is indeed a wasteland, "a heap of broken images"but not one of deert or where there is hope  something will grow, but that wasteland reminscent in Dante's hell: barren, desolate and rotting with no hope of redmption.

Elliot goes back and froth on subject matter and even visual subjects for the reader. He also goes into several different languages, even in the beginning inscription where Latin and Greek are bound together with the image of the Cumean Sybil who says (In Greek) "I want to die" when asked what she wants. Death could be that she feels there is no hope left for mankind. Even in the beginning lines, there is no hope shown when the poet is talking about the spring month of Apris. "April is the cruelest month". Most works that would showcase a spring month would talk about cherry blossoms or the beauty of jthe earth. T.S. Eliot uses that fertile month of spring time showcase his rotting and desloate land.

I feel that contradiction of spring is due to the putrid flesh of the dead. Where spring is stereotypically a time of renewal, for the soldiers of WWI, spring was a reminder of lost comrades.

I've read The Waste Land several times before, and although I admit that my understanding of the poem is  still very elementary, I nevertheless found it was refreshing to come back to The Waste Land after putting it down for a while.  It's as though the elusiveness of the poem makes it worth reading again, because I know that I'm going to view it differently than I did a few months ago.

I really love the way that Eliot transitions between voices and characters throughout these first two sections of the poem.  At one point in the first paragraph we meet a girl named Marie, who seems to come from an aristocratic family, "when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's," and "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." Interestingly, just a quickly as we meet Marie, she disappears in an ever-expanding dreary description of (what I think is a) literal waste land.

In the second section of the poem there is a rather confusing conversation from about line 111 to the end of the section.  The speaker is gossiping about a subject that was on everyone's minds after WWI--fertility.  There had been so much destruction and death during the War, and old systems (such as Marie's aristocracy) were decaying if not yet distinguished.  Eliot is really brilliant at adding tension to the dialogue of the gossip with the final bar call "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME."  Although the lines are technically unrelated, they work together to convey a real-to-life anxiety in the reader.

I'm sure that we'll talk about this in class, but I thought I'd mention Eliot's intentional use of archive in this poem.  The Waste Land essentially amasses the important western literature into a single poem that conveys a very contemporary mood.  I look forward to our classes this week, because I've certainly got a lot more to learn about this difficult poem!

This was my first time reading "The Waste Land" and, unfortunately, my copy of the poem does not include any footnotes. I felt incredibly lost after my first reading so I read some of the posts on the blog to see if that could clear up any confusion. I then started looking up more information on the poem and did several more readings. Obviously, Eliot's extensive use of quotations convey his modernist style, but it also seems to me that he tries to include references to texts and authors that are integral parts of the Western canon (Shakespeare, Baudelaire, the Bible). I think that Eliot's heavy use of these references injected into sections that are narrated by different speakers illustrates a central consciousness; the shared knowledge and understanding of important literary works unite us (Different european countries and The US).

I also think that Eliot's use of fragmented voices and different speakers creates a sense of chaos that mimics the destruction left behind after WWI. The reader is constantly trying to make sense of what is happening (especially me, reading sans footnotes) while the speakers move from thought to thought without any clear sense of unity between ideas. The title is telling here, because it causes me to envision a world left over after a war: one that has been decimated and there is no life left. I think this hopelessness and chaos is reflected in the writing.

Parsing the labyrinth of allusions in The Waste Land is difficult, first of all, because it is not always clear when Eliot is quoting at all. Some of his sources leap out at me. Most of them I do not recognize, reading the poem on my own. You might say that reading this work without reference to the annotations can hardly be called reading it at all. In order to spur thinking on the poem, I went back to my notes from late 2011, the last time I studied it. I guess it's a healthy sign that I've at least grown enough to be embarrassed by what I wrote then; "In order to 'make it new,'" I observed, "modernist writers made it obscure." This sounds more cynical than I probably intended, but I recognize more fully now the density of allusion in Eliot is not pure literary elitism so much as an attempt to develop a new language of modernism, a language which could incorporate and make sense of the enormity of literature which preceded Eliot. The line that most stuck with me the last time I read the poem was "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," which I think describes Eliot's modus operandi in The Waste Land. He assembles fragments of culture, "a heap of broken images," as a kind of collective cultural memory. If we can make sense of this past, perhaps we can make sense of the present. This is a terribly vague reading of the poem, but it's a place to start.

Perhaps Eliot is suggesting that the chaos of modernity, most destructively manifested in the Great War, is an affront to the "unreal cities" of past culture? Eliot allows modern life and modern technology to literally vulgarize the literature of the past: "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," is satirically replaced with "The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring." Similarly, Eliot blends Shakespeare with Irving Berlin, to create "that Shakespeherian Rag- / It's so elegant / So intelligent." This collision of "high" and "low" culture is a central feature in modernist and postmodernist texts, but it's not clear to me if its something that Eliot delights in or decries. He does seem to view modernity, the unstoppable forward motion of time, the usurpation of the past by the present, the present by the future, as a violent and destructive process, resulting in "Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal." This is such a rich, mysterious poem that it's difficult to know how to begin trying to comprehending it. Which gives us some sense of the confusion Eliot must have felt in attempting to confront the entire Western literary tradition. I wish I had something more concrete or insightful to say, but I look forward to examining the work in greater depth in class this week.

This is my fourth time working through The Waste Land, and as a result, I was particularly eager to pick out something that I hadn't paid much attention to in previous readings. The most significant thing that has changed since my last reading is my sudden interest in tarot cards (for the most academic of reasons). In the past few months I've become familiar with all the Major Arcana, so when reading through again, I was intrigued by the fact that only two of Madame Sosostris' cards are actual tarot cards (the Hanged Man and the Wheel). Eliot seems to have invented cards to suit his intentions and meanings, which strikes me as rather odd considering his detailed use of historical and literary references. One would think he might be more able to use existing cards if he wanted to, so there must be a good reason that he added in some of his own.

I did a bit of research, and while the Fisher King has a corresponding card acknowledged by Eliot himself (the three of Wands), and Belladonna and the One-Eyed Merchant have been postulated to be the Queen of Cups and the Six of Pentacles, the Drowned Phoenician Sailor really has no reliable corresponding card. The card is a jarring removal from the cosmic cycle symbolized by the Major Arcana, suggesting that the cycle has been broken, that the damage may have been irreversible. Where accepted tarot cards might have suggested that society is merely at a low point of the cycle, the introduction of new cards, especially that of the Phoenician Sailor, who is dead even in the midst of the ocean and its symbolism of life and renewal, and who shows no potential of transitioning into another card.

Interestingly enough, however, the trend I have seen in other writings on The Waste Land with respect to tarot cards seems to lean towards the tarot cards as an indication of hope and the possibility of renewal. I'm quite interested in addressing this in class and seeing what everyone thinks!

A couple of articles on The Waste Land and tarot: http://www.jstor.org/stable/view/30053210 and http://crossroadstarot.com/thewastelandandtarot.htm.

The Waste Land is a poem expressing emotions of what it was like to live through World War I. From just the few pages we have started to read, there is a sadness that exists throughout the writing and the uncertainty that existed for many people in this time. Eliot use of classical commentary in the poem, to me, shows a simplier time that many in this time began to look back to. He seems to use Greek, Biblical, and other forms of classic writing to exhibit virtue and an ideal lifestyle that is lacking within the world during WWI. He also bends the meaning of words to mean the opposite, if that makes sense. He plays with words to show extent of the suffering.

There are two instances that caught my attention when Eliot used words to exhibit what he was trying to feel. The first is within the first few lines of the poem. It starts on line 5, "Winter kept us warm covering/ Earth in forgetful snow." This use of word twisting is very expressful. When one thinks of winter, the first you don't usually associate it with is being warm. But winter brought a slow and even in some instances a stop in the war. So for a few months, they were able to kind of forget there was so much going and the new snow would cover up many of the battlefields and let people forget what was to come on those same battlefields in just a few months. The other interesting use is in his description of the "unreal city." It paints a picture of the mourning people in the cities, which it seems to Eliot was becoming too common of a sight in this lifetime. This use of words and twisting of words really seem to stretch back to a time when war did not tear apart the world. The classical "throwbacks" paint the world in as the hightime of life for anyone, but now people look forward to the winter time when they used to look forward to the spring and summer time. It seems to Eliot that the world has turned upside down.

I have read The Waste Land before, but that was quite some time ago. I have a feeling that I am just as confused as I was the first time I read it. It seems to require a lot of contextual reading that may have been common knowledge for the intended reader, however I do not think we have had that same background experience with literature. Some of the passages did reference works that I have been exposed to, but I still  do not fully comprehend their connection to one another. 

After reading some modernist and WWI poetry, fragmentation and confusion seems to be a common theme. This may represent an overall feeling that people felt during and after WWI, especially those who experienced war first hand. I also notice focus on humanity and its origins, a possible cry for a lost culture. It also seems there is a quest for true origin through reference itself, each reference links to another and has you scrambling trying to track a single source of meaning. The historical references almost seem to trap the reader with its legacy.

In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot integrates voices from all throughout human history in this fascinating critique of Western tradition and World War I. His quotations and references include the Canterbury Tales, various Shakespearian plays, the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, to name a few. These pieces, though originating at different times and in different countries, are all part of Western culture and tradition. By bringing all these pieces of Western culture together in The Waste Land, a work that critiques World War I and the modern condition, Eliot is possibly suggesting that the ultimate end of the great advances in Western culture is nothing but confusion and violence.

Line 60, beginning with “Unreal City” introduces a particularly bleak section that hinges on a passage from Dante’s Inferno. Here, Eliot describes how “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many” (62-63). This passage compares the crowds of the morning commute in London to the masses of people fated to reside in the vestibule of Hell. Eliot seems to suggest that, in spite of the wonderful culture of the past, the present is nothing but hellish monotony. To add to this gloomy idea, many of the people in this commute are heading to work in factories that manufacture war supplies. The War is a source of great unhappiness, but people continue to plod along to their regular routine, sealing their unfortunate fates. 

I would like to begin by saying that I have no idea what was going on for most of the Waste Land. Even after reading through a couple of times, looking at Eliot's notes, and skimming through a some of the "critisisms". I've always been really bad at "getting" poems, and most of the allusions and meanings in this one went right over my head. I'm probably misunderstanding even the parts that I think I did understand

That being said, there was one line in Part III that I feel I comprehended, so I'm just going to write about that. The line reads: "By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...". According to the footnotes, this is a biblical allusion, referring to the mourning of the Jewish people for Jerusalem. In  the poem the narrator is weeping for the people and things that are missing from the Thames. It parallels the mourning for days gone by experienced by all of the people that were left alive after the war. 

This is the third time I have read The Waste Land for class, and each time is a little bit different of an experience. The first time I was completely lost and utterly confused. However, once we began to pick it apart it began to make more sense. My second experience with the poem was very similar. This time around I remembered much more of what I had learned, which helped me as I read. What makes this poem so difficult, at least in part, is its extensive use of quotes and fragments from a wide range of classic works such as poems, plays, books, and more modern writings and scenes. 

I find I spend about the same amount of time reading the footnotes explaining all of the quotes and references as I do reading the actual poem itself. Eliot obviously intended this to be a difficult poem, and I think he's making a very interesting comment on the state of civilization, modernity, and the war by using so many strange juxtapositions and fragments. He builds this extremely modern poem on fragments and pieces of some of the greatest works of literature (in English and in other languages), suggesting that the modern era is built off the pieces of different aspects of the past as well. It also shows a tension between high and low culture, as both of these are present, and placed side by side within the poem. The disjointed, confusing, searching, fragmented nature of the poem also seems to me to reflect the sentiment that people would have had after WWI. The world had fallen apart and broken around them, and they had to piece it back together the best they could with the pieces and fragments of literature, culture, history, and technology as best they could. That is how I see the importance of Eliot's use of quotations and references in The Wasteland, and how it comments on the time and the war. I think that there is a lot more to it that even that though, because there are so many possibilities with a poem like this one.