An analysis of the Allusions in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.doc

An analysis of the Allusions in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 姓 名 院 系 专 业 班 级 学 号 An analysis of the Allusions in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Introduction The Waste Land is an important poem. After we read it, we feel that we have quite a lot of views to say and it should have an important effect on the readers, too. But it is not easy. In T. S. Eliots own words: We can say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization as it exists at present must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning. He continually contrasts the present with the past and often uses literary allusions to help to arouse in the reader the response he wants. Actually, in my opinion, the allusions also play a very important role in the modernism features of this long poem. II. The appreciation of the allusions in T. S. Eliot抯 The Waste Land iAccording to the dictionary, an allusion is something that is said or written that refers to or mentions another person or subject in an indirect way. As we all known, there are a large amount of allusions in T. S. Eliot抯 The Waste Land, and it is left to the reader to make the connection. iAlthough the allusions make the long poem very hard to read and understand, they are an important feature of it. Then I will choose a few points to appreciate them and analysis how the allusions help to depict the desolation of the modern life. In modern time, the west became a fragmented civilization with no longer a united set of beliefs which characterized the world of the pr