《T. S. Eliot The Waste Land》.ppt

The Waste Land (1922) T. S. Eliot Purpose of The Waste Land To convey the soul’s and civilization’s sense of emptiness, confusion, and aimlessness after WWI To provide a means of regeneration for the soul and civilization To revitalize poetry Objective Correlative “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding the ‘objective correlative’, in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” The Objective Correlative The waste land is the situation that signifies human despair and fear of death Premise of The Waste Land We need to accept that all wars are one war, all battles are one battle, all journeys one journey, all rivers one river, all rooms one room, all loves one love, and ultimately, all people one person. All of the specific examples of these things in the poem are in every case representative of their kind. The Meaning of The Waste Land convey the state of post-war civilization and the soul through “the heap of broken images” transcend the ego by identifying with the continuity of significant tradition, of the inherited wisdom of the human race External Sources Biographical and historical background The collective vision The Waste Land: Biographical and Historical Contexts—Modern Aimlessness Biographical Context met Ezra Pound, who introduced him to several modernist poets married Vivien Haigh-Wood worked at Lloyd’s Bank had a nervous breakdown; recuperated in Margate and Lausanne, Switzerland Historical Context: WWI had laid the battlefields to waste had spiritually scarred soldiers and the population at large had physically weakened populations, enabling the Spanish flu to kill over 50 million people The Waste Land: Regeneration Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious the unconscious inherited wisdom of the race contains all of the