World War I

In "The Wasteland," T.S. Eliot uses a very complex system of quotation in order to make a statement about western society during World War One. If a single quotation from a character goes multiple lines, he opens the quotation every line, but does not close it until the last line of the quotation. In this way, I feel that T.S. Eliot means to make the individual statements fall into a sort of "white noise" status. I say this because, when reading the poem, every time that I see that open parenthesis I find myself wondering things like, "Is this line a continuation of the last, or an entirely different statement from a different person?" because of this, the individual lines, instead of reading to me as one individual thought, read as a sort of jumble of noises coming out at once.

The World War One connection came to me at the concluding lines of the first part, which read, "Stetson!/"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!/That corpse you planted last year in your garden/"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?" Here, the mention of the ships of Mylae, automatically made me think of WWI, the most recent war to the time of this poem's publishing. Here, the "white noise" text reads as that not of one WWI vet, but of the zeitgeist of the society, and the questions of whether or not the corpse have begun to sprout mean to ask whether or not the soldiers' actions in that war will ever bring any benefits to them.

One of the most frequently discussed tactics used by T.S. Eliot in his influential poem "The Waste Land", is his consistent insertion of quotations into the piece. This was a technique that Eliot used to demonstrate the chaotic nature of the modern existence and was achieved by juxtaposing various literary texts against his words. In Eliot's view, humanity's psyche had been shattered by WWI as well as by the collapse of the once-famed British empire. By creating a mashup using different pieces of dialogue, various images, scholarly ideas from the Old World, foreign words and various stylistic tones, Eliot found a new way to examine the destroyed visage of the British Empire. Almost every line in "The Waste Land" echoed a canonical text or an academic work -- but only partially. By fragmenting the quotations in this poem, Eliot was emphasizing the broken and fractured nature of the modern world.

Another way that Eliot used quotations in this poem was in his examination of high and low culture. Like many modernist writers, Eliot was fascinated with the disconnect between the high and low cultures of the time. To further emphasize the cracked and hollow nature of the post-war world, Eliot included many high brow references -- such as Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer and even the Bible. However, he also included many low brow references -- best exemplified in his usage of popular song from 1912, "The Shakespearean Rag". These inclusions allowed Eliot to jump from speaker to speaker, through low and high culture and gave him the ability to redefine the canonical texts of the past through the denigrated world of the present.

T.S. Eliot implements a heavy use of quotation and reference in this poem.  I do not know if these references would have been common knowledge to readers at the time, but the constant referal to the footnotes does make reading more complicated than would be expected.  This being said, I do not feel as though these references detract from Eliot's work as a whole.  I feel like they add to it.  They bring a new layer to the piece for the reader to work through and dissect.  It is simple enough to read on its own, but investigating the meaning behind these references brings more meaning to the piece, and the extra work is well worth it.

Eliot presents a strong connection with the past in The Wasteland.  If I am not mistaken, most of his quotations or references come from the past and not from the contemporary pieces of its time.  This focus on the past is strong, much like in cultural tradition in which each new generation is built upon the foundations of the generations past.  This intermingling of old works with his own new work creates a unique literary experience, but not an entirely unique overall experience.

Obviously, Eliot found quotation to be a necessary element of The Wasteland...every other line requires more than a mere glance at the footnotes.  But Eliot's reference to other works is so frequent that it also necessarily detracts from the artistic experience of reading Eliot's own piece as a work of art in itself.  This had to have been intentional, as many of Eliot's own notes are often provided within the footnotes of the work.  Clearly several references were difficult to keep track of in reading, even for the poem's creator.  Eliot  must have foreseen his audience's reaction to the poem as one so laden with outside background information that it became nearly imposible to interpret.  Eliot could have made the work simpler, yet instead he deliberately chose this path for The Wasteland.  Critiquing the Western tradition of recalling ancient history, culture, and story-telling, Eliot overburdened his work with these elements so as to obscure the present, living poem he had written.  

Before the direct reference to war begins around line 140, several of the allusions present a motif of an aged character, powerful, yet weakened by their own fact of self.  One such example is to Sibyl, whom my footnote describes as "a prophetess blessed with eternal life but doomed to perpetual old age".  Like Sybil, the presentation of the other allusions present two images.  The first is a critique of Western literary and cultural tradition in relying on the romanticized past (literary, military, social) and past values to guide the world of the then-current society.  The second is a represenation of humanity as a vulnerable hero.  Humans may indeed have dominion over the earth, Eliot seems to imply, yet they have not yet learned how to forgive themselves for their own mortality.  This is the cause for war.  Humanity consistently attempts to overcome death by reaching great heights of power, only to forever repeat a cycle of war and self-destruction.

The Waste Land brings together a mashup of voices from different sources. These voices come from different times, past and present, different classes of society, people of different genders, and they are even packaged in several different languages. In some ways, T.S. Eliot presents himself not as a poet but as a collector of these voices, an editor instead of an author. The poem is completely different from a poem by Keats, for example, who most often paid close attention to form, rhyme, euphonia, etc. The Waste Land crashes many different sounds and speakers together, so that the resulting poem looks like a collage of former poems. He also irrerevently places the dialogue from a pub on the same page as the line "Those are pearls that were his eyes", a quote from Shakespeare.

With references to writers like Shakespeare and Dante, Eliot is not merely invoking the words of dead generations for their conciseness and wisdom. On the contrary, he is exhuming their words in order to examine their usefulness to the modern age. Given the obscurity of the poem, it is not clear what the reader is supposed to conclude from this practice. But the fact that Eliot is implicitly questioning canonized literature raises the question of how his own poem ought to be read and studied, if at all. This partly mocking attitude is his way of confronting the reader directly, by means of the poem. He is proposing a new relationship between literature and history, and the opacity of the poem is his challenge to the reader to figure out the answer to his question.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a complex poem because of all of the references to previous works of art. He quotes from other pieces of literature, and he slyly refers to others within the text. Reading “The Waste Land” is not just reading his poem; basically, the reader is also expected to understand all of his allusions – these bits and pieces of other works. In order to truly understand this poem, you would need to know and understand the depth of all of these references, not to mention you would need to know other languages –like German.

In building on and referring to the work of others, Eliot shows the complexity of Western tradition and Western thought and the debt each new generation owes the generation of artists which came before. In a way, he also shows the complexity which was World War I. Each country brought to the war its own conflicts, enemies, and allies. We cannot truly understand World War I without understand all these bits and pieces – all these contributions. In considering this complexity, “The Waste Land” becomes representative of both Western tradition and World War I itself.   

    I was, at first, very confused as to what kind of signifcant connection existed between the images in the Dada magazine but one blog post from another student helped to steer my analysis.  The images seemed to be totally random except for one thing, I was able to find mechanical and cylindrical objects.  I noticed that the seemingly random way in which the images were arranged were very similar to other modernist pictures we have studied in class.  These pictures are not neccessarily supposed to be understood completely.  There was a universal idea after the war that not everything has to happen for a reason and modernist art was often a reflection of this.  And so, I do not think that these images are to be easily interpreted.  There is supposed to be an idea left hanging with no resolve.  

    That being said, I think the depictions of machinary to be very deliberate, especially since it is repeated in every image.  I agree with another poster that this was also a reflection of a post war mentality.  Men were machine-like.  They had been used as nothing more than tools in a senseless war and upon returning home had been left with questions that had no answers.  They were forced to push on, voids of what they had once been.

In the Data Magazine there were futuristic-like machines which I found rather interesting. The images of machines made me think of the steam punk culture which is a fantasized exaggeration of the Victorian and the Industrial era. Similar to steam punk culture the Dataist images suggest a connection or morph of human and machine, a cyborg. Another important connection is to the mechanical effect of war. During and after World War I, men felt like machines. They had no emotions, their personal thoughts did not matter, and they were simply killing tools that preformed blindly ordered tasks.

Some of the images within the magazine seemed to be random technological objects. I am not entirely sure what purpose all of these images were to serve, but I would guess much of their meaning lies in symbolism and the mechanical lack of emotion.

I also found it interesting that none of the images focused on the beauty of scenic landscape, which was typical of the past. Instead there is a celebration of and a hopeful future in technological advancement, human invention rather than nature.

My first thought upon seeing Apollinaire’s “It’s Raining” was that it looked like children’s poetry. It reminded me of the Shel Silverstein poems that were all the rage in elementary and middle school. However, after reading and absorbing it, I decided that there’s probably a bit more to this poem than the ones I read as a tween.

That being said, I’m still not altogether sure what this poem means. It certainly is interesting.  The vertical positioning of the words on the page force the reader to fully absorb the words, rather than just skimming the page. Reading all the way down one column and then jumping up to the next column makes for a very choppy reading experience. Perhaps Apollinaire used this choppy formatting to make a statement about life during World War I. Disillusionment and disconnect are key characteristics of modernity, and the crooked lines of letters that make up this poem seem to exemplify that.

If I’m interpreting this poem correctly, each letter is supposed to be a raindrop. This seems a bit ironic to me. Traditionally, rain is associated with life and renewal, not the death, disdain, regret, and fetters that this poem describes. But, perhaps this too is indicative of life during World War I. Because the War turned life upside down for the men and women of Europe, Apollinaire may have felt that it was appropriate to turn a traditional symbol of life, rain, on its head as well.  

In the Dada magazine I find the images to be interesting. One of the images in particular is of a bolt of some kind. I was trying to figure out what type of bolt and as wrong as I probably am because the appearance is not quite the same, but is similar, it reminds me of a charging bolt in a weapon. The words that accompany this work of art is "d'une jeune fille americaine, dans le etat de nudite", this translates to "the young American girl in the state of nudity". The artist is comparing this image to a nude girl. Comparing this image to the war it's saying that the men have possibly lost their humanity and have become more machine or robot-like and their idea of a women is another machine. I think of a charging bolt because in order for their weapon to function properly it has to be clean and almost perfect, by describing the bolt as a nude woman it is an image of beauty- in the mechanical sense she must be perfect and taken care of. Men from the war have forgotten the true beauty of what is around them and is comparing it to the only thing they know-war. They have lost their true selves and their art becomes the war itself, as depressing as that is. How do they return to the realities of home, but to compare them back to the war? They lived so long in the art of mechanics, doing the same thing over and over day in and day out, the mechanics become the art and they may just not know how to come back from it. This idea could easily resemble any soldier with "shell shock" they are remembering their mechanical ways and their weapons or tools of the war are their women, their art. The last thing I want to mention is the fact that the tool itself says "for-ever" on it. Forever will the fighting men be reminded of the war, they cannot forget. How do they return to the realities of the world after the war? Is it even possible?