The Waste Land by T.S Elitot is not an ordinary poem at all. It is very complex to read and quite long to be a poem. So, that is why I’ll do my best to write about my understanding of the poem.
From the very beginning of the poem with the subtitle “the burial of the dead”, I got the impression that it would be a very dark poem. This impression was even assured when I read the first line of the poem which is “APRIL is the cruellest month”. Then, as I kept reading I realized that in the first paragraph there are some contradictory concepts. A clear illustration of so, is snow and sunlight.
Let’ remember that this is a contemporary poem which was first publish in 1992, so it is highly important to take the context into account in order to make a more suitable understanding. World War I had just finished a few years before and this absolutely impacted on the whole society. It is known that eight million people die more or less during the period of time this war lasted. Therefore, men and women became disillusioned or hopeless about their own futures and the nature of humanity.
I think that Eliot tried to evoke and share that feeling of uncertainty. As if life can be vanished all of a sudden. I believe this is a complaining about the kind of lifestyle that 20th century brought. Well, there must be hundred of way of analyzing this poem. What I know for certain is that it needs to be read carefully and with time to think it over.
From the very beginning of the poem with the subtitle “the burial of the dead”, I got the impression that it would be a very dark poem. This impression was even assured when I read the first line of the poem which is “APRIL is the cruellest month”. Then, as I kept reading I realized that in the first paragraph there are some contradictory concepts. A clear illustration of so, is snow and sunlight.
Let’ remember that this is a contemporary poem which was first publish in 1992, so it is highly important to take the context into account in order to make a more suitable understanding. World War I had just finished a few years before and this absolutely impacted on the whole society. It is known that eight million people die more or less during the period of time this war lasted. Therefore, men and women became disillusioned or hopeless about their own futures and the nature of humanity.
I think that Eliot tried to evoke and share that feeling of uncertainty. As if life can be vanished all of a sudden. I believe this is a complaining about the kind of lifestyle that 20th century brought. Well, there must be hundred of way of analyzing this poem. What I know for certain is that it needs to be read carefully and with time to think it over.
By Nataly Moyano
Nataly's interpretation of T.S. Eliot is inclined to uncertainty, the same feeling that I presented in my post, but I developed more (even with examples) the contradictory concepts and the references to others literatures, making this poem an eclectic representation of a period between wars. I started to think that he just wrote randomly all the words of the text, and then we all interpreted as "art", but then I re-read it (and thanks to the analysis in the classroom) I could connect some ideas that are the representation of the dadaistic movement that was born also between wars, because of the use of the words and the lack of sense that is prevailing in the poem.
Dadaism (if you don´t know) was born as a response against the cultural cannon and also as a response against the war (the WWI and WWII). I can connect the use of different languages as a reference of a cosmopolitan point of view to the world and not a chauvinist perception of it from a country that is in war. But, as Nataly presented "there must be hundred of way of analyzing this poem". In spite of this poem was written in dadaistics times, I must confess that I still found hidden meaning in its lines, maybe because T.S Eliot encrypted a timeless message into his poem about something that I cannot see... or just simple I am getting nuts because of the end of the semester.
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