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Eliot’s The Waste Land

Thomas Stern Eliot was born in the year 1888. Known as the most daring innovators of the twentieth-century poetry, Eliot brought about a revolutionary change in poetic style and diction. He never compromised either with the public or indeed language itself. He always followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. In spite of the difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliot is a poet from the Modernist period. He was witnessed the chaos of the world war one and much of that is reflected in his work. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land, is a lengthy and complex poem about the intellectual and cultural crisis which were a result of the World War I.

When The Waste Land was published, the poem was seen as a radical experiment. Eliot distributes traditional verse form. He presents morbid images of very known cultures with scholarly allusions to classical and ancient literatures and myths. The world war from 1914 to 1918 was a crucial moment in the recent world history. It created a profound effect on the literary insight of a generation but also gave a new dimension to society. The war inspired a great amount of literary production. Poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Ivory Gurney were the forerunners of new genre of poetry, as they attempted to give manner to the trepidation of the wars.

The title of the poem is an allusion to the devastation of the war and the poem is a metaphor to the devastated landscape of post-war Europe. Ezra Pound wrote, shortly after the poem was published, that the “ Waste land is I think the justification of the movement”, “ of our modern experiment, since 1900”. The poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the experience of the First World War and from Eliot’s personal gut-wrenching experiences.