《T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land》.ppt

T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land 4/04/2008 Mythic method T.S. Eliot’s review of Ulysses: Ulysses gives “a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (The Dial, 1923) Admiration for Joyce: he uses analogies drawn from myths (including literary myths) “instead of narrative methods” (i.e. the chain of causes and effects). This is part of his search for “impersonality”. To relate subject and object, past and present, reality and myth, text and text. Parallelism between contemporary world and ancient world. Intertextuality as a means of control (?) of chaos. fragmentation., etc. (Analogies, relations, oppositions, reversals, paradoxes) Gerontion as a sketch of Tiresias, the most important “character” of The Waste Land Semantic paralysis of a negative present (until the conversion in 1927) Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance. Ezra Pound’s contribution: method in the organisation of the material. Published in October 1922 in Criterion and a month later in The Dial in The US. Eliot’s notes to the poem to explain (in part) references. The Metaphysical Poets (1921) Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes”. The Waste Land (Weston): winter unproductive land, to be exorcised ritually so as to pave the way for renewal. Every epoch presents the same schema: death and renewal, dryness and rain, dry roots and green leaves. Waste Land is Dante’s Inferno, the alienated city in Ba