Thomas Stearns Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 for his excellent contribution to the planet of existing-working day poetry. A person these kinds of pioneering do the job of his is The Wasteland. For Eliot, the wasteland symbolizes that space of human lifetime wherever men exist without the need of a guiding faith, exactly where males have turned their backs on religious enlightenment, and the title points to this predicament.
The poem, divided into five elements is so fragmented, lacking in rational continuity and time sequence, and is a projection of the psychological oscillations and conflicts which raged in the soul of man in the early twentieth century (the condition is no diverse these days). Eliot felt that Western civilization experienced develop into mechanical, dull and dehumanized. Corruption, degeneracy and stark materialism ended up rampant. In this broken fragmented world, almost nothing could be integrated.
Inspite of the poem staying a patchy kaleidoscopic entity, it is held with each other only in the all-embracing prophetic vision of Tiresias, the bi-sexual blind seer of historic Greek tragedy, and what Tiresias sees is the compound of the entire poem. Psychologically talking, he is the acutely aware of humanity. As a symbol of the previous even now surviving in the existing, the aged Tiresias, “with his wrinkled female breast” has foresuffered all that is staying enacted in the hideous stage of the contemporary earth.
He transcends the barrier of time and location with swift flashes embracing with his empty gaze, now a scene in the current – the pictures of “the ruins of the slipping London bridge”, a “taxi throbbing and waiting”, to epitomize the daily life of an immoral and wanton twentieth century typist, as also of the past – Dante’s inferno, the amorous sport of Cleopatra, Elizabeth, and provides out in our psychological image the enormity of the sin fully commited by the legendary king Oedipus of Thebes – the drought-and-sin ridden land – in his sexual violation of his mother Jocasta, and of the requirement of purifying the sinner’s soul by way of suffering.
In The Wasteland, the photos and symbols slide broadly into two types: the photos taken from the typical features of urban existence but lifted to great intensity (the throbbing taxi graphic), and the symbols from myth, nature and religion – these remaining centred in the theme of dying and rebirth. Thus drought is symbolic of religious dryness, and rain of non secular fertility. Even so, specific objects may perhaps symbolize two opposite concepts dependent on their capabilities. Hence, water is, on the 1 hand, a image of generation – of daily life and development, of purification and transformation, in the kind of a river or sea and, on the other hand, it is also destructive of lifetime and house. Similarly, fireplace as a damaging agent, is a image of lust which consumes a person to a state of “living dying” but fire, as the sacred altar-flame, is also a image of inspiration, illumination and spiritual exaltation. Eliot frequently plays with ambivalent illustrations or photos.
Of the post-war European modern society, its religious sterility is conveyed by the symbol of a stony and barren soil. The notion of a stalemate, of life arrive to a useless end, is conveyed by the image of the “video game of chess”. The idea of daily life as meaningless, boring and languid motion in a slim circle is conveyed by the graphic “we are living in a rat’s alley exactly where lifeless guys misplaced their bones”. The concept is bolstered by the images of squalor and vulgarity, as for occasion, the river sweats oil and tar and carries along its recent the dirty freight of empty bottles, cigarette ends, silk-handkerchiefs and other recommendations of summer season events and sexual encounters concerning town-nymphs and their chance paramours.
The concept of barrenness, decay and dying is woven with the quest for everyday living and resurrection which Eliot found in the legend of the Holy Grail and other anthropological myths, with a sprinkling of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu religious analogies, and the feeling of launch from this condition and of flexibility is conveyed by the picture of a boat gliding easily beneath the skilled hand, God, who delivers to balance all the reverses that guy has accomplished in the stupid perception of his superiority, and thus, of self aggrandizement.
The Wasteland is Eliot’s non secular autobiography, his lookup by way of the junkheap of modern culture for an integrating theory just as you would have a Pilgrim’s Progress (From this planet to that which is to occur, by John Bunyan). Eliot’s eyesight moves backwards and forwards with a relentless shuttling movement around legend, perception and image. And, in the finish, the pilgrim, now seemingly a solitary determine, walks on. The grass is “singing” and there arrives a moist gust convey rain”, symbolic of rejuvenation, of resurrection. Three claps of thunder are listened to, and the voice of the thunder, in Sanskrit, presents a few text of advice: “Give, Sympathize and Control” – “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih”, the peace that passeth all comprehending. Eliot sees the solution to human condition in Hindu religious phrase.
Eliot forces the dilemma of the wasteland on us simply because we, whether or not we know it or not, are the citizens of the “unreal metropolis” and we have to find our Grail – the platter utilised by Jesus at the Final Supper and in which a single of his followers is stated to have been given His blood at the Crucifixion.
