I think this is the intent as Eliot is communicating that modernity is a jumble of sensory inputs that confuses the modern mind (as of 1920, at least.) In 1920, modernity was funneling the news of the world to the average citizen by movies, radio, and newspapers. The Burial of the Dead section shifts from voice to voice, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. Sometimes, Eliot would strip a section of vast quantities of text.Īnother part of the problem is that the poem is deliberately cacophonous. What the Thunder Said - as independent units, often taking sections from prior unpublished poems to put into The Waste Land. As we learn from Matthew Hollis in The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, Eliot wrote the five parts of The Waste Land - I.

Eliot never intended the poem to be an integrated, unitary whole. Part of the problem is that the search for meaning in this poem is a search for fool's gold. I love 'April is the cruelest month' and 'Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.' But I've been handicapped by not being able to understand the damned thing. Give me a clap at Medium (Now with jokes) - really want to like The Waste Land. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism, and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists-of Ezra Pound, who edited it of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it and of T. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. A century after its publication in 1922, T.

It has been labeled the most truthful poem of its time it has been branded a masterful fake. Renowned as one of the world’s greatest poems, The Waste Land has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era.

The waste land