Eliot, Thomas Stearns - Works and “The waste land”

Le due fasi di T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot's works can be divided in two different periods: before the conversion and after the conversion. The works of the first period (before the conversion) are characterized by a pessimistic vision of the world, in fact he was suffering because of his unhappy marriage life, he had a lot of problems with his insane wife, so everything was bad and negative for him. In fact, this period was characterized by spiritual avidity and lack of love, His masterpiece, "The waste land", was written in this period. As concerning the second period (after the conversion), it was characterized by hope, joy, purification, and

optimism. It's not a case that during this period he wrote his more optimistic works (for example "Ash Wednesday", "Four quartets").

L'impersonalità dell'artista

Together with James Joyce, they shared a lot of important things:

•impersonality of the artist:

they believed that the artist should not be involved in the writings. So, the man who suffers, the man who has feelings, must be kept away from the mind that creates a peace of art. So, there is a clear distinction between the

man and the artist, also because they were strongly convinced that the artist has not a personality to express. The artist should escape from emotions (art doesn't give any kind of emotions, because art is impersonal, so the artist is

outside the work he creates).

•Another key word is "archetypes", T.S.Eliot's characters are symbols of the

modern characters, of the modern citizens.

So, every single character describes his prototype of the modern century.

La complessità di The waste land

The waste land is an extremely complex poem, but it was originally organized and simplified by his friend

Eliot decided to dedicate the poem to Ezra Pound, that he named "il miglior fabbro", an italian quotation taken from Dante Alighieri. The Waste Land consists of 434 lines divided into five sections:

1)”The Burial of the Death": which tells about the opposition between sterility and fertility

2)"A Game of Chess", which juxtaposes the present squalor to a past splendour.

3)'The Fire Sermon", where the theme of present alienation is rendered through the description of a loveless, squalid sexual encounter.

4 )" Death by Water", which reinforces the idea of spiritual shipwreck.

5)"What the Thunder Said", which evokes religions from East and West.

Il significato di The waste land

It's about the spiritual avidity of contemporary society (in fact this poem was written before the conversion, when everything was bad and negative), but at the same time, it was also about the man's continuous search for religious

meaning for a reason for living. The Waste Land doesn't describe only the devastated world of the first world war, but also the devastated world of

the human's soul. It's a kind of journey within the devastated world of human's soul; this journey becomes a kind of quest, a kind of search for the holy grail, an Arthurian legend ("il sacro Graal") that represents a solution to the problems of human beings. The Waste Land is a collection of hallucinations, it's a collection of states of mind, impressions, situations and different personalities. All these passages, that are all fragmented, belong only to one voice, but the problem is that this voice has a lot of personalities. And this idea goes beyond the limits of time and space, this because of