The Waste Land (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: T. S. Eliot
- First Published: 1922
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Narrative poetry, Symbolist literature
- Subjects: Mythology or myths, Twentieth century, Alienation, Death or dying, Folklore, Rites or ceremonies, Knights or knighthood, Tarot
The most celebrated poem of the twentieth century, The Waste Land epitomizes modernism—its anxious usurpation of previous texts in the literary tradition, its self-conscious desire to be new, its bleak analysis of the present as a post-lapsarian moment between a crumbling past and an uncertain future. Composed of five separate poems, the overarching poem is, in poetic range and effect, greater than the sum of these parts. Eliot combines many of the themes and techniques he had examined in his earlier work, themes such as aridity, sexuality, and living death, and techniques...
[The entire page is 1206 words long]
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