Posted by John on Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 1:20pm.
"The Waste Land" is a long, complex poem of 433 lines about a wilderness which seems both personal and external. The poem is divided into five sections and is dedicated to Eliot’s friend and poet, Ezra Pound, as it was Pound who revised and edited the poem.
The first four sections are named for the Greek classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The fifth section is usually interpreted as referring to ether, the fifth element.
"The Waste Land" cannot be reconstructed into a coherent, logically ordered narrative since the images are juxtaposed, not logically ordered. The lack of a narrative sequence, along with the continuous time-shifts, make the "The Waste Land" a modernist poem.
Eliot chooses a fragmentary style because it is the only way to reproduce the broken, fragmentary knowledge of modern man. The fragmentation of the poem is, therefore, a reflection of the fragmentation of contemporary culture in which each individual must try to find a personal ordering or interpretation.
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