They’re all wasted! Essay Example for Free

Theyre all skeletal EssayTheyre all wasted proclaims The Whos Roger Daltrey in 1971s Baba ORiley, a stock widely and mistakenly believed to be titled Teenage waste matter because of the refpelting. Putting an emphasis on all, this is a sweeping indictment the youth are all wasted, not just one group or in one way, but everywhere and in every faculty. Every potentialfor rebellion, discipline, pleasure, beliefhas been squandered. But The Who were far from the scratch to imagine this modern wasteland. T. S. Eliots poem, The botchland, provides a wide-ranging critique of modernity, while also modeling the esthetics of the newborn epoch, that pulls statements interchangeable The Whos intelligible while building on established literary and favorable conventions. The historical context for Eliots poem can be divided into three major components. First, on that point is the literary customs duty writ large, the collected textual productions of the world over the last several millennia.The Wasteland makes reference to the Bible (20-3), Buddhism (173), Dante (62-5), Shakespeare (172), Greek tragedy (218), and many more sources the Norton Anthologys cup runneth over with footnotes. Second, there is English literature. It is more likely that Eliots peers would measure him against the immediate backdrop of national history, not least because education in excellence in English literature is also education of the excellence of English literature.Thus Eliot mustiness be able to demonstrate k directlyledge of Shakespeare and Marvell at the minimum, but also make an original contribution to the English literary tradition coming out of the nineteenth century. As in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Eliot addresses nineteenth century British Romanticism with modern inversions of the celebration of unadulterated nature. In the opening paragraph we have a modernized parallel of Wordsworths A Beauteous Evening, shut up and Free Summer surp jump outd us, coming ov er the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofg nontextual matteren,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. (8-11) The natural world is pleasing and comforting to humanity in this miniature. The surprise of rain does not seem to dampen the spirits of the characters but rather, through the stop in the colonnade, causes them to pause and so appreciate the reappearance of the sunlight. The construction Summer surprised us gives the natural world and its seasons a signifier of playful agency, as in the Romantic tradition. However, we cannot think of Eliot as remaining within the Romantic tradition despite his utilization of it as a literary option. The third vital context is the recently cerebrate World War I.Hence the agency of the natural world, insomuch as Eliot images such agency for literary purposes, is as ambivalent as human nature. The opening lines, also drawing on literary causation in Chaucers Canterbury Tal es, depict a less loving nature. April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, commingle Memory and desire, stirring Dull grow with spring rain. (1-4) The April showers that diddle May flowers, to paraphrase Chaucer, bring a conflation of life and death instead of pilgrims. April is personified, as in Romanticism, but here it is so that it can be labelled cruel.Life is not an abstractly generative force since at least Sidneys Astrophel and Stella and Shakespeares Sonnets, English literature has had a rich tradition of sexual metaphorics, using phrases like Dull roots for phallic impotence and spring rain for ejaculatory procreation. But Eliot cannot simply celebrate this cycle of rebirth in the shadow of the muddy graves of World War I. The mixing / memory and desire recasts the common literary relationship amidst sex and death in a perverse light, since memory transgresses the discriminateition between the living and the dead, the present and the past.Mem ory exhumes what is past, does not allow it to die and rest in peace. This corpse is now also the object of desire. The cycle of death and rebirth has been stalled in modernity and in the vision of The Waste Land. Eliots poem both represents and partakes of this modern problem in fact, the necessity of participating in the forces of societal infertility to represent it might be one of the most distinctively modern aspects that Eliot represents here. The broad compass of historical literature that he can draw on is the result of the British empire contacting and importation cultural products from around the globe.His knowledge of languages and availability of translations when necessary further speak to world literature as a thoroughly modern phenomenon. The need to reject or critique prior traditions is also part of the modern awareness of the dialectical nature of history. Of course, this also marks (ironically) a point of continuity with Victorians like Baudelaire (67). The fr agmented form of The Waste Land is part of this modern rejection of tradition, but to depict this fragmentation Eliot must also gather together multiple traditions.They are juxtaposed with each other but without a master narrative to organize them. To further drive the point home Eliot also uses non-standard grammar or spelling, or seemingly nonsense words and sounds O O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag (128). This equivocalness then contrasts with the grim and undecorated conversation circling, like Hemingways Hills Like White Elephants, around an spontaneous abortion I cant help it, she said, pulling a long face, / Its them pills I took, to bring it off, she said (158-60).Stylistic innovation and rejection of stifling rules of art allow Eliot to create a radically new expression of the human experience, but in doing so he simultaneously duplicates the rootlessness and anomie he is want to overcome. The Waste Land articulates combatting notions of history, progress, and form that do not reach any conclusive resolution in the poem or in its subsequent readings. With the aid of hindsight the critic can understand Eliots ripening religious conservatism in subsequent works like Journey of the Magi. By trying to overwhelm every literary and theological mode, he winds up putting them all at a deductive reasoning even if ones chosen credo is somewhat arbitrary it at least allows enrapture into the myth of rebirth. The forces in tension in The Waste Land chart two continuing policy-making alignments. The will or willingness to subscribe to any belief is most darkly visible in the rise of the Third Reich the willingness to subscribe to none is most visible in our inability to decisively commit to the measure of subsequent atrocities.Eliots poem provides a space for considering these questions without prejudicing the question through contemporary political affiliations. The political question can be momentarily set aside if we imagine, for the time being, that this is merely art for arts sake.Works CitedEliot, T. S. The Wasteland. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York W. W. Norton and Co. , 2000. 236