Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Waste Land -T.S. Eliot


            As I expected, I found The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot a challenge to read. The poem is broken up into five different sections. Each section seems to have multiple speakers who do not discuss any one topic in particular. They all seem to be discussing what is going on around them or recalling a memory of some sort. The topics range from a girl’s summer in Germany to the thunder. Some portions seem like they are a stream of consciousness while others seem fairly well organized. I assume this is the confusion Elliot was trying to portray as he wrote this poem.
            Throughout the poem Eliot uses many languages and discusses several countries including France, England, Germany and Russia. Is this a reference to World War I? I assumed it was because the poem was published in 1922, a few years after the war. The various languages added to my confusion as I read, and did not help the already choppy flow of this poem.
            I almost feel like I have questions about more of this poem than parts that I understood. I found myself wanting to analyze every section, but I’m not sure that’s what Eliot wanted readers to do. For example in section two the women speaking to one another discuss some type of “pill” that the woman takes. Is this Eliot’s reference to some early form of birth control? Or am I reading way too far into that? I have many more questions like that one. I think Class tomorrow will help me a lot with this reading. 

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