The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a highly influential 433-line poem by T. S. Eliot. The title is often mistakenly written as The Wasteland.

Critical reception

The poem's initial reception was originally mixed; though many hailed the poem for its portrayal of universal despair and ingenious technique, others, including F.L. Lucas, detested the poem from the first. Edmund Wilson?s influential piece for The New Republic, ?The Poetry of Drought?, which many critics have noted is unusually generous in arguing that the poem has an effective cohesive structure, emphasizes autobiographical and emotional elements:

Related Topics:
F.L. Lucas - Edmund Wilson - The New Republic

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:"Not only is life sterile and futile, but men have tasted its sterility and futility a thousand times before. T. S. Eliot, walking the desert of London, feels profoundly that the desert has always been there. Like Tiresias, he has sat below the wall of Thebes; like Buddha, he has seen the world as an arid conflagration; like the Sibyl, he has known everything and known everything in vain."

Related Topics:
London - Tiresias - Thebes

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Critic Harold Bloom has observed that "The major for 'The Waste Land' is Walt Whitman's majestic elegy, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," though most of Eliot's critics fail to see this." The major images of Eliot's poem are found in Whitman's ode: the lilacs that begin Eliot's poem, the "unreal city," the duplication of the self, the "dear brother," the "murmur of maternal lamentation," the image of faces peering at us, and the hermit thrush's song.

Related Topics:
Harold Bloom - Walt Whitman's

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