Free Waste Land Essays: The Current Relevance :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The authoritative Relevance of The Waste Land Eliots poem, The Waste Land, is at to the lowest degree as relevant to life today as it was in 1922, when it was freshman published. All of the themes stated at the beginning of the Norton Anthologys introduction to the poem ( religious dryness, a lack of regenerating belief to give meaning to life, and dying without resurrection) argon with us to an even greater degree than they were at the clipping the poem was first published. (Introduction 2146) The attitudes toward sexuality that are implicitly condemned throughout the escape have not changed in any way that Eliot would be credibly to see as an improvement, either. The Waste Land does not merely set an anthropological description of a culture, however, and the solution proposed by Eliot seems as relevant today as it must have been in 1922. Like Blake, Eliot constructs a personal mythology, but Eliot draws on a larger number of sources than Blake does several(a) religions fr om both the east and the west, works of literature from around the world, and works of philosophical system and anthropology. Eliot refers to the fragmentary references throughout the poem at the end of the poem by saying, These fragments I have shored against my ruins -- that is, Eliot has taken fragmentary references and pieced them together in an begin to come to grips with the modern situation in which he finds himself. (line 431) The references from the poem are nearly always references to the past, when a cultural heritage was common to an wide-cut people, the themes described in the Norton Anthologys introduction were nonexistent (or were problematic to a a great deal lesser degree than in the modern era), and when sexuality found its chemical formula in a context Eliot would have seen as appropriate -- a mature relationship between men and women that expresses both love and personal passion. Perhaps more important than the building of this personal mythology, however, is the solution Eliot explicitly offers in What the Thunder Said. Eliot weaves in a Hindu story in which gods, devils, and humans each ask their common father, Prajapati, for advice.