Survey Research Report

ON
T. S . Eliot as a Modern Literary Personality on
Especial Reference to his the Waste Land A Critical Study

Department of English and other Foreign Languages

Supervised by
Dr. Ranveer Pratap Singh
Assistant Professor

Submitted by
Km Babita Maurya
Roll No: 57023617002
Enrolment No:KA2K23/57023617002

Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith

NTPC Campus
Shaktinagar Sonebhadra ,Uttar Pradesh

1
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It gives me great pleasure to present the project on “T. S . Eliot as a Modern Literary
Personality on Especial Reference to his the Waste Land A Critical Study” it was a
totally different & wonderful experience to study the writing on T.S Eliot is one of the
most important poets of 20th century.

I am thankful to my faculty guide Dr. Ranveer Pratap Singh for their continuous
support throughout my training I confess deep sense of gratitude towards my parents as
well my friends ,teaching and non-teaching staff.

Their constant encouragement and timely suggestion .in all it was a great experience of
working on this project.

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 DECLARATION

I do hereby declare that this project report entitled “T. S . Eliot as a Modern Literary
Personality on Especial Reference to his the Waste Land A Critical Study” has been
submitted by me in partial fulfillment of Master of Arts In English MAHATMA
GANDHI VIDYPITH

I declare that this project is exclusively prepared and conceptualized by me.

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 CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that Km Babita Maurya has worked and duly completed her project
work for the degree of master of Arts in English ,Semester under faculty of Mater of
Arts in English and her project is entitled “T. S . Eliot as a Modern Literary
Personality on Especial Reference to his the Waste Land A Critical Study” under
my supervision. I further certify that the entire work has been done by the learner under
my guidance and that no parts of it has been submitted previously for any Degree on
Diploma of any University .it is her own work and reports by her personal findings and
investigations.

Dr. Ranveer Pratap Singh Dr. Pradeep Yadav

Assistant Professor

Project Guide CAMPUS INCHARGES

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 Contents

Sr no Chapter Page no

1. Introduction 7-20

 Characteristics of the 20th-Century

Literature

 T.S. Eliot’s Biography

 The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth

2. A new reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land 21-28

 The Burial of the Dead

 A game of chess

 The Fire Sermon

 Death by Water

 The Thunder

3. Themes in the Waste Land 29-37

 The Arab poets and the Waste Land

 Nature in the Waste Land

 The Arab Spring and the Waste Land

4. Conclusion 38-39

5. References 40-41

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 Abstract
This study analyzes the characteristics of twentieth-century literature through the
perspective of the modern individual that T.S Eliot invents in his poem “The Waste
Land”. To achieve this goal, I attempted to outline a general framework of an approach
that could be followed by students and researchers in studying and reading the poem,
and one which could make studying “The Waste Land” a more joyful, relaxing learning
experience. The approach outlined in the poem itself consists of stages; each stage
depends on the other for its accomplishment. And the whole poem is divided into parts
that are all relevant to the poem's main objective. In every part of the poem, T.S. Eliot,
introduces us to a new and different story. The study analyzes the poem through the
analytical perspective in light of the characteristics of modern literature in the twentieth
century to explore its themes and ideas of it. So in this study, I shed light on the
characteristics of the 20th century, particularly, poetry. Then, I hardly proposed my own
reading of the poem and its influences on me. After that, I tried to trace the development
of my understanding to the poem and connect it with my maturity and understanding to
the “Arab Spring” and I compared the atmosphere that shaped Europe after the horrible
war in 1914 and the atmosphere the Arabs live in nowadays. Finally, I referred to two of
the most Arab figures in modern poetry influenced by the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Al-
Sayyab and Darwish.

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 Introduction
Eliot and other twentieth-century writers respond to the ironic changes and
consequences of modern technology and thought, which include a wide range of themes
and subject matters. The change includes the writers, their writings, as well as the
attitudes of the reading public. This leads to a revolution in poetic composition.
Generally speaking, the literature of the twentieth century can best be characterized by
its diversity of themes and ideas, structural constructions, and technical devices. On the
one hand, T.S. Eliot utilizes his writing in order to dramatize the variant philosophies
and views of life and existence. He explores the choices left for the individual to escape
the determination of his fate by the blind laws of heredity and environment. Therefore,
the questions of freedom, moral obligation, self-reliance, spirituality, and religious faith
have been recurrent themes in The Waste Land. Furthermore, themes like pessimism,
stoicism, and indifference resurfaced frequently in twentieth-century literature. An
example of this can be found in the works of many writers. The cry for spirituality and
religious faith as the only way to salvation is dramatized in the works of Eliot. His
poems "The Waste Land," "The Hollow Men," and "Journey of the Magi" all suggest
religious faith and spirituality as the only ways to make life meaningful and endurable.
As a result, the poetic revolution and shifts in attitudes as well as composition not only
seek to meet change but also serve as a culmination of such change or shift. As a matter
of fact, one can find out that the diversity of themes in literature is a result of the
widening of the scope of literature caused by scientific development. However, the
linguistic and literary characteristics of Eliot’s work offer concrete evidence of the
influential role of the industrial revolution in his life. "The Waste Land" is composed of
images of experiences and situations where the protagonist travels. These images are
drawn from 5 modern Europe after World War One and are sharply contrasted with
other images from different cultures, particularly the ancient. In each section of five the
poem, the protagonist is seen through certain experiences and situations that reveal some
kind of fissure in European culture. To start my study, I preferred to begin with the
characteristics of 20th-century literature, the poetic revolution, the structural formulas,
and the narrative techniques.

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 Characteristics of 20th-century literature
The main characteristics of modernist literature were shaped by the poetic revolution in
structural constructions and technical devices. First, the shift in attitudes caused by the
First World War led to a technological revolution in the literature of the 20th century.
The imagists insisted on formulas that implied focus and cohesion. For example, if one
examines any piece of modern poetry, he will see flexible stanzas, free metrical
movements, as well as precision and cohesion. Second, T.S. Eliot adds a new criterion
of complexity and allusiveness to that of concreteness and precision stressed by the
illustrators. His "Waste Land," for instance, shows the convergence of Donne’s
complexity, French symbolism, and the imagists’ precision. If we take lines (124–126)
in "A Game of Chess":

"I remember; those are the pearls that were his eyes."

Are you alive or not? "Is there nothing in your head?"

Surely, Eliot achieves compression and irony in the sudden shift from formal language
to colloquial and also through the sharp contrast between the allusion to the love of
Ferdinand and Miranda in "The Tempest" and the guilty people of present-day Europe.
Another technical device introduced by Eliot is the objective correlative, i.e., "a set of
external objects or ideas, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of a
particular emotion." (Hamlet:48). In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, line 51, I
have measured out my life with coffee spoons." The objective correlative then serves to
keep an emotional distance between the writer and the work. The coffee spoons are
elements in a formula that should produce an emotional response. Third, various criteria
of composition characterize 20th-century poetry. In fact, sound techniques and
rhythmic.

Modern poetry was often characterized by patterning such as alliteration, assonance-par

rhyme, and three-stressed lines. Third, regarding fiction, new structural formulas and
narrative techniques are employed in 20th-century literature, and psychological
discoveries have introduced into literature the possibility of probing new depths into
human characters. The First World War reflected cultural developments in psychology
that imposed new demands and new attitudes like the stream-of-consciousness
technique and the precise choice of point of view. Fourth, the demands for individualist
freedom and human rights can also be traced in almost all the literature. For example,
the poetry of soldier poet Wilfred Owen is an assault against the traditional views of war
and death for one’s country as it reinforces the theme of the pity of war (i.e., "Dolce et
8
Decorum Est," "Strange Meeting," and "Futility"). Third, the question of free will is
tryingly probed in various works. For example, in Joyce’s short story "Counter Part,"
light is shed on the wrongs committed by fathers against sons. Since the suggestion is
that awareness of this can both illuminate and comfort, Fourth, pessimism and despair
can be seen in the writings of Hardy and Hopkins, respectively. In Hardy’s "Hap," the
narrator blames it on "cross causality" that "obstructs the sun and the rain," while some
of the poetry of Hopkins shows utter despair. In his "terrible sonnets," he appears to be
wrestling with God. "Where is your solace, your relief?" Fifth, one can trace various
views of transcendentalism and romantic escape as suggestions of salvation. In
Robinson’s "Credo," the narrator, "lost in the awful chaos of the night," escapes to find
it "above, beyond it all." In Cumming’s "Thy Fingers Make Early Flowers Of," a
romantic escape is suggested. Sixth, Stoicism can be traced in some of the works of
literature. In Dylan Thomas’ "Do Not Go Gentle," stoicism is suggested as a solution to
old age.

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 T.S. Eliot’s Biography
“What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” (T.S. Eliot)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and
died in London on 4 January 1965. He studied at Harvard University, and at the
University of Sorbonne in Paris, and then he moved (at age 25) in1914 to the United
Kingdom and studied at Oxford University in London. He became a British citizen in
1927. Literary critics and intellectuals considered him one of the most prominent poets
of the 20th century. He wrote many famous poems: The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock, the Waste Land, the Hollow men, and Ash Wednesday. He was awarded the
Nobel Prize for arts in 1948. In 1922, he wrote The Waste Land and literary critics
considered it a real representative of his fine past after the First World War and after his
first difficult marriage. “The Waste Land” is also considered one of the most important
and difficult poems in the history of English literature in particular, and in international
history in general. When a professor told Eliot that his students were having difficulty
with The Waste Land, he was “informed that they were looking for what was ‘not
there’” (Southam 38). When Eliot was in Lon-don he met Ezra Pond, who recognized
his poetic genius, and helped him in the publication of his work. Pond describes The
Waste Land as “a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective
experience of the first world war and from Eliot’s personal travails” (Pericles:p1).

Eliot as a poet and as a literary critic had a greater influence on twentieth-century poetry
all over the world than any other individual. In the 403 lines of The Waste Land, there
are allusions to or quotations from more than thirty-five different writers as well as
words and phrases from six different languages.

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Life
Early life and education
Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a middle class family originally from New England.
T.S. Eliot's grandfather William Greenleaf Eliot had moved to St. Louis, Missouri [2][5]
in order to establish a Unitarian Church there. His father Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919)
was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the HydraulicPress Brick
Company in St. Louis; his mother Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929) wrote poetry
and was a social worker, a new profession in the early twentieth century. Eliot was the
last ofsix surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old when he was born. His
four sisters were between eleven and nineteen years older; his brother was eight years
older. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal
grandfather Thomas Stearns

Severalfactors are responsible for Eliot's infatuation with literature during his childhood.
First, Eliot had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital
double inguinal hernia, Eliot could not participate in many physical activities and thus
was prevented from interacting socially with his peers. As Eliot was often isolated, his
love of literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately
became obsessed with books and was completely absorbed in tales depicting savages,
the Wild West, or Mark Twain's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer. [6] In his memoir of T.S.
Eliot, Eliot's friend Robert Sencourt comments that young Eliot "would often curl up in
the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain
of living." [7] Secondly, Eliot also credited his hometown with fuelling his literary
vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other
environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's
childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I
consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York,
or London." [8] Thus, from the onset, literature was an essential part of Eliot's childhood
and both his disability and location influenced him.

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin,
Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen
under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of
the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he
destroyed them. [9] His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a
school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. [10]
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Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an
untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard
University's student magazine. [11] He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds
of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story
significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's
Fair of St. Louis. [12][13][14] Such a link with primitive people importantly antedates
his anthropologicalstudies at Harvard. [15]

Following graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a

preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste
Land. He studied philosophy at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning his
bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usualfour. [2] Frank Kermode writes
that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908, when he
discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). This
introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without
Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les
amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life. [16] The Harvard
Advocate published some of his poems, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad
Aiken, the American novelist.

After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to
Paris, where from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended
lectures by HenriBergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier. [2][16] From 1911 to
1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. [2][17] Eliot
was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914. He first visited Marburg,
Germany, where he planned to take a summer program, but when the First World War
broke out, he went to Oxford instead. At the time, so many American students attended
Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the
Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes, after Eliot reminded the
students how much they owed American culture.

Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and
university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling
children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I
don't like to be dead." [18] Escaping Oxford, Eliot actually spent much of his time in
London. This city had a monumental and life-altering impact on Eliot for multiple
reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential literary
figure Ezra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on
12
22 September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot
"worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's beginning career as a poet as he is credited
with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to
biographer John Worthen, during his time in England Eliot "was seeing as little of
Oxford as possible". He was instead spending long periods of time in

London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war
has so far spared... It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere." [19] In
the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton, and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at
Birkbeck, University of London.

By 1916, he had completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and

Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, but he failed to return for the viva voce
exam. [2][20]

13
Marriage
In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote, "I am very dependent
upon women (I mean female society)." [21] Less than four months later, Thayer
introduced Eliot to Vivienne HaighWood, a Cambridge governess. They were married at
Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915. [22]

After a short visit alone to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and
took several teaching jobs, such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds
stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but
the allegations were never confirmed. [23]

The marriage was markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health issues. In a
letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of her symptoms, which
included a habitually high

temperature, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, and colitis. [24] This, coupled with apparent
mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for
extended periods of time in the hope of improving her health, and as time went on, he
became increasingly more detached from her. Their relationship became the subject of a
1984 play Tom & Viv, which in 1994 was adapted as a film.

In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that
I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit
myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of
[Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the
marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came
The Waste Land." [25]

14
Teaching, Lloyds, Faber and Faber
After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate
School, a private school in London, where he taught French and Latin—his students
included the young John Betjeman. [2] Later he taught at the Royal Grammar School,
High Wycombe, a state school in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra money, he wrote
book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses. In 1917, he took a position at
Lloyds Bank in London, working on foreign accounts. On a trip to Paris in August 1920
with the artist Wyndham Lewis, he met the writer James Joyce. Eliot said he found
Joyce arrogant—Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time —but the two soon
became friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris. [26] Eliot and
Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close friendship, leading to Lewis's later making his
well-known portrait painting of Eliot in 1938.

15
Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship
On 29 June 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism, and in November
that year he took British citizenship. He became a warden of his parish church, Saint
Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles
the Martyr. [29][30] He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself
"classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion". [31][32]
About thirty years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a
Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament". [33] He also
had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the path of progress for modern
man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citing Goethe and
Rudolf Steiner as exemplars ofsuch a direction. [34]

One of Eliot's biographers, Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's
conversion] were two-fold. One: the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for
himself, and I think Eliot needed some resting place. But secondly, it attached Eliot to
the English community and English culture." [28]

Separation and remarriage

By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When
Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932–1933
academic year, he accepted and left Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged
for a formalseparation from her, avoiding all but one meeting with her between his
leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. Vivienne was committed to the
Northumberland House mental hospital, Stoke Newington, in 1938, and remained there
until

she died. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, he never visited her. [35] From
1938 to 1957 Eliot's public companion was Mary Trevelyan of London University, who
wanted to marry him, and left a detailed memoir. [36][37][38]

From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who
collected and managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive".
[39] Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after
Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their
household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he
bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965.

16
On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30.
In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary
at Faber and Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony
was held in a church at 6:15 A.M., with virtually no one in attendance other than his
wife's parents. Eliot had no children with either of his wives. In the early 1960s, by then
in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for the Wesleyan University Press, seeking
new poets in Europe for publication. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to
preserving his legacy, by editing and annotating The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a
facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land. [40] Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at
her home in London. [41]

17
Death and honors
For many years Eliot had suffered from lung-related health problems including
bronchitis and tachycardia caused by heavy smoking. He died of emphysema at his
home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green
Crematorium. Through certain points of his life, including prior to his stay in Margate
where he had first conceived The Waste Land, and during his second marriage, he had
suffered from bouts of heavy alcohol abuse, with a particular fondness for large
quantities of gin, but these had not caused him physical deterioration in old age as did
his smoking. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St. Michael's
Church in East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had
emigrated to America.

 A wall plaque commemorates him with a quotation from his poem "East Coker",
"In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."

 In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the
installation of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster
Abbey. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates,
his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem "Little Gidding", "the
communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the
living." [42]

 The house where he died, No. 3 Kensington Court Gardens, has had a blue plaque
on it since 1986. [43]

18
 Poetry
For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was
aware of this even early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former
Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse,
and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters
is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event." [44]

Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books
or pamphlets, and then collected them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and
Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in Ara Vos Prec
(London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different
order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the
American edition. In 1925, he collected The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and
Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems: 1909–1925. From
then on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions are Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse; Poems Written in Early Youth,
posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between
1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems
1909–1917, material Eliot never intended to have published, which appeared
posthumously in 1997. [45]

During an interview in 1959, Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "I'd
say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished
contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England.
That I'm sure of. ... It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good;
putting

it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it

wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its
sources, in its emotionalsprings, it comes from America." [46]

It must also be acknowledged, as Chinmoy Guha showed in his book Where the Dreams
Cross: T S Eliot and French Poetry (Macmillan, 2011), that he was deeply influenced by
French poets from Baudelaire to Paul Valéry. He himself wrote in his 1940 essay on
W.B. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that I needed to teach me the use of my own voice did
not exist in English at all; it was only to be found in French." (On Poetry and Poets,
1948)

19
 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet
Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song ofJ. Alfred Prufrock".
Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem
when he was only twenty-two. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening
sky to "a patient etherised upon a table", were considered shocking and offensive,
especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the
nineteenth century Romantic Poets.

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet

Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song ofJ. Alfred Prufrock".
Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem
when he was only twenty-two. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening
sky to "a patient etherised upon a table", were considered shocking and offensive,
especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the
nineteenth century Romantic Poets.

The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante and
refers to a number of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the French
Symbolists. Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The
Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the
mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself.
They certainly have no relation to poetry." [47]

20
 The Waste Land
In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Eliot's dedication to
il miglior fabbro ("the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in
editing and reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version
that appears in publication. [48]

It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was
failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The poem is
often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Before
the poem's publication as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its
vision of despair. On 15 November 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As
for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now
feeling toward a new form and style." [49]

The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its
abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. This structural complexity is one of the
reasons that the poem has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic
counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses. [50]

Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear
in a handful of dust" and "Shantih shantih shantih". The Sanskrit mantra ends the poem.

21
 The Hollow Men
The Hollow Men appeared in 1925. For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir
of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in The Waste
Land." [51] It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar to Eliot's other works, its
themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Europe under the Treaty of
Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's
failed marriage. [52]

Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing that, "The mythologies disappear
altogether in The Hollow Men." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante
as anything else in Eliot's early work, to say little of the modern English mythology—
the "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian mythos
ofJoseph Conrad and James George Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history,
echo in The Waste Land. [53] The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form. [54]
The Hollow Men contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion:

22
 The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth
The Waste Land is the situation that signifies human despair. T.S. Eliot's use of literary
fragments, myth, and everyday experience is an attack on the traditional viewpoints of
previous writers. Eliot uses what he calls "a mythical method" to give his writing
meaning and also to revitalize poetry. In his Waste Land, Eliot does not leave anything
not mentioned in the poem; he employs Latin, Greek, German, Sanskrit, and Indian
languages and legends, and all are "influences" in The Waste Land. Indeed, this reflects
his deep knowledge of the world that he lives in. So, the influence of The Waste Land
extends to the whole world and occupies the minds of intellectuals and writers, in
addition to the formal people. Mohammad Mahdi, in his study of The Waste Land,
urges, "The Waste Land has the whole history of the world as its matter of discussion;
all the world's incidents, either in history or in literature, have been alluded to in the five
parts of the poem." However, they are not reported fragmentarily. "All the fragments
had been put together as incidents happening to one individual, and so they make a
unified whole." (Mahdi: P2). I observe that Mahdi wants us to see the poem as a
historical document that reflects Eliot’s personality and his understanding of the history
of the nation. As a result, he considers the poem's five parts, each of which discusses a
different foundational period of human history. Eliot reflects on the moral decay that has
afflicted Europe in particular and the world in general in The Waste Land. Eliot
considers the war as the end of an important stage of European thought. Therefore, he
and other writers of the twentieth century demonstrate a new philosophy to respond to
the changes and consequences of modern technology and modern thought. Sometimes
we see Eliot change the speaker’s voice to express the fragmentation and the
complexities of life that characterize European countries. Jo Ellen Green Kaiser agrees
with what Wilson said in the poem. Wilson found the structurally fragmented poem
representative of the "chaotic, irregular, fragmentary." (Kaiser: 83). Pericles Lewis
points out that Eliot’s use of quotations from different languages is because he seeks to
address modern problems. He writes, "The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation
(in several languages), variety of verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to
create the sense of speaking for an entire culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the
essential statement of that crisis and the epitome of a modernist poem." ( Lewis:p1-2) I
verify that this method of assembling fragments or broken images from the past into a
sort of mosaic allows him at once to suggest parallels, connect the past with the present,
and show us the main idea of his poem, which is modern life as a wasteland.

23
 A new reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land
As mentioned above, Eliot and other writers of 20th-century literature respond to the
ironic changes and consequences of modern technology and the complexities of life
imposed on the individual. So, Eliot in The Waste Land utilizes his writing in order to
dramatize the variant philosophies of life and explore the choices left for the individual
to escape the determination of his fate by blind laws of heredity and environment.
Therefore, the questions of human rights, moral obligation, spirituality, religious faith,
indifference, and despair reappeared quite often in his work as the only way to salvation.
Eliot's Waste Land is composed of images of experiences and situations where the
protagonist travels. These images are drawn from modern Europe after World War One
and are sharply contrasted with other images from different cultures, particularly the
ancient. In each of the five sections of the poem, the protagonist is seen through certain
experiences and situations that reveal some kind of fissure in European culture. Lines
424, 427, 431, and 433–34 show the culmination of the protagonist's experiences: his
choice has come as a conclusion or a terminus of his journey, suggesting a way out of
the corruption and chaos revealed in the poems. He actually behaves similarly in
analogous situations.

24
 The Burial of the Dead
In "The Burial of the Dead," the general situation is set forth along with its own theme.
The Waste landers are "neither living nor dead," preferring to remain under the cover of
"forget the snow. “Eliot gives examples like the hyacinth girl who cannot celebrate her
love, the crowd over "London Bridge" without pain but without hope, and Stetson’s
corpses that will not "bloom" because the people do not want them too. In fact, the
Burial of the Dead here has no signs associations with rebirth, as it did in ancient Egypt
(i.e., fertility and resurrection). Moreover, with Madam Sosostris’ "wicked pack of
cards," other themes of sterility and infertility are foreshadowed: "The lady of
situations... fears death by water." Ultimately, the protagonist’s journey begins through
these entanglements, with him and the reader being part of it: "You are my double."

25
 A game of chess
In Part Two of "A Game of Chess,” the protagonist witnesses the chaos, emptiness,
despair, and triviality of the wasteland people, as dramatized through the rich woman
and the working-class woman. The rich woman, in spite of her wealth and fortunes,
lives in emptiness and despair: "What shall we ever do?" Moreover, her relationship
with her husband reveals a gap in people’s relations with each other and stresses their
loneliness and isolation. They, like the working-class women, appear to be struggling to
forget while being head over heels in triviality. They are bringing forth too many
children, but it’s out of their well, so they "bring it off." From another point of view, the
association of the little with seduction is significant: the emptiness and triviality of the
people cause them to try to forget and pass the time in the game of chess, so the lustful
and sterile sex in "The Fire Sermon" springs from such situations that again have their
roots in the first parts. In fact, this significant connection of the causes and effects
continues throughout the poem, and such a succession will inevitably lead to the ending.

26
 The Fire Sermon
The Fire Sermon" is much more direct in its emphasis on the outcome of the loss of
faith and the adherence to modern materialistic values: people surrender to the fire of
passion and, instead of being purified, they are lost. Here one encounters people rushing
to Mrs. Porter’s brother and the typist who’s "glad it’s over," unlike Queen Victoria or
the Rhine Maidens who wept for it. There are also the Thames Daughters, who, losing
their virginity, make "no comment" or "connect nothing with nothing." Finally, this
section shows the climax of corruption as all the values and practices are turned upside-
down.

27
 The Thunder
The final part of The Waste Land, "What the Thunder Said," shows the protagonist in
waves of hope and despair, but with hope quite strong and moving. At first, all the
images and allusions reveal despair. the crucifixion of Christ, the drought and thirst of
the disciples, and the preserved tension or confusion in the wasteland: "Here one can
neither stand nor sit." The appearance of Jesus to the disillusioned then restores hope:
"But who is that on the other side of you?" (i.e., remember Jesus, He's always by your
side). Despair, on the other hand, interferes with great cities destroyed by wars "now,
and with thunder without rain," and "empty exams and exhausted well." Values, order,
and meaning in the wasteland actually prepare the wasteland for salvation, for it is
utterly a wasteland: "The jungle crouched, hummed in silence, and waited for rain."
Moreover, What "speaks the thunder" is actually the rain for such wasteland: "Datta":
get out of the prison of your own self-interest and sympathize with others, and control
your passions.

The final part of The Waste Land, "What the Thunder Said," shows the protagonist in
waves of hope and despair, but with hope quite strong and moving. At first, all the
images and allusions reveal despair. the crucifixion of Christ, the drought and thirst of
the disciples, and the preserved tension or confusion in the wasteland: "Here one can
neither stand nor sit." The appearance of Jesus to the disillusioned then restores hope:
"But who is that on the other side of you?" (i.e., remember Jesus, He's always by your
side). Despair, on the other hand, interferes with great cities destroyed by wars "now,
and with thunder without rain," and "empty exams and exhausted well." Values, order,
and meaning in the wasteland actually prepare the wasteland for salvation, for it is
utterly a wasteland: "The jungle crouched, hummed in silence, and waited for rain."
Moreover, What "speaks the thunder" is actually the rain for such wasteland: "Datta":
get out of the prison of your own self-interest and sympathize with others, and control
your passions.

Finally, we see that this passage shows the way out of the wasteland, coming as an
inevitable conclusion of causes and effects and in the sense of an outlet for the
protagonist’s suppressing experience.

28
 Themes in the Waste Land
The discussion of themes in The Waste Land refers to the various philosophies and
perspectives on life and experience. Eliot's themes deal with the suffering of people and
the complexity of life imposed on the individual. The Waste Land is composed of
images of experiences and situations in which the protagonist travels. Simpson sees that
Eliot's theme is "modern life as a wasteland." (Simpson:1), and he delves into the major
themes by demonstrating what was wrong with society in the early twentieth century.
First, the cry for spirituality and religious faith as the only way to salvation is
dramatized in "The Burial of the Dead" and "Death by Water," and he assumes that
death can pave the way for new life. He says in the Waste Landlines (71-2), "That
corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? "Will it bloom this year?"

Second, the demands for individualists’ freedom and human rights can as well be traced
as assaults against the traditional views of war and death. The poem comes as a mirror
that reflects the real face of Western modernism after the huge destruction of World
War I. Eliot complains that this "panic war" changed everything and that history repeats
itself. He says this in lines 68-9. "There I saw one I knew, and I stopped him, crying,
"Stetson!"

"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!"

Eliot explains the large theme through the motifs and images of confusion and loss to
express his deep sadness about what is going on in Europe. So he portrays Europe,
which has power and the industrial revolution, in an ugly way. The Europeans have the
power, but they lack wisdom.

He says in lines 19–30 that,

"What are the roots that clutch? What branches grow?"

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say or guess because you are the only one who knows.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats

And the dead tree provides no shelter, and the cricket provides no relief.

And there was no sound of water coming from the dry stone. Only
29
There is a shadow under this red rock

Come in under the shadow of this red rock

And I'll show you something other than either or

Your shadow in the morning strides behind you. Alternatively, your shadow will appear
in the evening to meet you; "I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Basically, Eliot in these lines summarizes his bitterness and sadness and tries to escape
from his personality because of the low level that Europeans reach. These wrong events
are not inevitable in the circumstances, and the suggestion is that awareness of this can
both illuminate and comfort. Third, the corruption of sex, as Eliot suggests, shows the
climax of corruption and all the values in the West. He indicates this in many places.
For example, in "A Game of Chess," he shows how much sex becomes a necessity not
to please your partner but to satisfy oneself. He states in line (141): "Now that Albert’s
coming back, make yourself a bit smarter." Then he adds to express the people's
emptiness and triviality in lines (153-4). "If you don’t like it, you can get on with it," I
said. If you can't pick and choose, others can."

In his reading of these lines, Joseph King claims, "Sex, here, is viewed as a bare human
necessity, lacking all forms of spirituality, love, or respect between two individuals." "It
is purely for the satisfaction of man against the celibacy of time and war" (p. 1). He also
stresses it when he talks about the lady of the situation who was raped by King Tereus,
as Eliot says in

lines 102–3.

"And she still cried, and the world still pursues,"

"Jug jug" to dirty ears.

For that, Eliot uses the principle of complexities to respond to the ironic changes and
consequences of modern life. Cleanth Brooks states that "the poet works in terms of
surface parallelisms, which in reality make ironical contrasts, and in terms of surface
contrasts, which in reality constitute parallelisms." (p.2) Eliot uses this kind of irony to
compare the prosperous past and the obscure present. As a result, I believe the best
reading of Eliot's theme is what Cleanth

Brooks says in his reading of The Waste Land: "the rehabilitation of a known but now
discredited system of beliefs." (Brooks:3)
30
 The Arab poets and the Waste Land
Eliot's Waste Land has influenced all twentieth-century poets. The great Arab poets
were not exceptional in this regard. The Arab poets, as Sadiki Gohar asserts, "found
salvation, solace, and insight in Eliot’s literary and critical heritage." Gohar (2006:40).
This enormous impact of Eliot's poetry on Arab poets, particularly Badr Shaker Al-
Sayyab, the leading figure in the process of modernization of Arabic poetry, "engaged in
dialogues with Eliot's literary heritage" in his "modernist narratives reflections of the
state of death and fragmentation which characterized life in the Arab wasteland in the
post-WWII era."(Ibid:41). Al-Sayyab, like Eliot, tries to express the complexities of the
Arab people and the damage that has been done to the Arabs as a sequence to the
created doll regimes, so he portrays images of his suffering and the suffering of the Iraqi
people in a Semitic way in his poetry, particularly in his poem "Hymn of the Rain," to
heal his pain and bitterness on his country and his people. Al-Sayyab says, "I can hear
Iraq storing thunder, storing lightning on mountains and in valleys, and when she has
finished, she will stamp them as her own." (The great storm left no trace in the valley or
in the village of Thamud.) / I can hear the palm trees dripping rain. I can hear the
villages moaning and the emigrants battling with oars and rough axes; I can hear the
storms of the Gulf and the thunder, singing: "Rain.../ Rain.../ Rain.../ Rain. How many
tears did we shed the night we left, justifying our grief by saying, "It's just the rain.”?
Gohar adds, "Al-Sayyab struggled to develop expressive poetics to embody the
aspirations of the Arab people after WWII. "Violating the classical tradition of Arabic
poetry, Al-Sayyab created a poetic achievement by developing devices, themes,
techniques, and a narrative style essential to the modern spirit" (Ibid.: 42).

It is evident that Al-Sayyab violates the classical tradition of Arabic poetry and applies
new devices and techniques as essential to modern poetry and to the Waste Land of Iraq.
Through these new technical devices in poetry, he tries to show us the role of literature
and to share in the liberation of his people by showing their social, political, and
psychological collapse because of the awful monarchy regime in Iraq. He expresses his
sadness in this poem by addressing the sky over Iraq. The sky in Iraq rarely stores the
thunder and the lightning in the plains and the mountains. The sky sends the rain, and
the spring comes after to cover all of Iraq. In spite of this rain, hunger, poverty,
homelessness, and savagery spread in Iraq as a result of this chronic regime. Ghanim’s
notes Assyyaab’s transposed Eliot: When he says (P.21, lines 21–23), "Muhammad ‘s
death leads to our death,"

He has passed away. And we died in him, both the dead and the living.
31
We are"/

Ghanim verifies, "This is the basal text’s description of the crucifixion of Christ" in
What the

Bible Thunder Said:

"He who was living is now dead."

"We who were living are now dying."

Hence, Al-Syyaab, in his poetry, is similar to Eliot; he recognized that our values,
dignity, and Traditions have been shattered, and repairing them has proven difficult, so
we now live aimlessly

Another great poet influenced by T.S. Eliot's poetry is Palestinian poet Mahmoud
Darwish.

Darwish, particularly, in his myth "Jidariyya" (Mural). Death in this poem forms a
poetic obsession.

Death changes everything, and no one can avoid it. The poet experiences the Arab
defeat. generate such despair and sadness. He says,

"Death, wait for me beyond this earth,"

Wait for me in your country while I finish my work.

A passing conversation with what is left of my life

Outside your tent, wait for me while I finish

reading Tarfa-bin-Elabd, "Tempted"

by existentialists, I want to draw the last drop.

in every moment.

of freedom, of justice, of the wine of gods...

So death! Please wait while I finish.

the funeral arrangements in the fragile spring."

32
Eventually, Mahmoud Darwish, in his poem "Mural," repeats Eliot’s philosophical
questions about death and rebirth, and he mentions dozens of old historical,
mythological, and religious references, particularly the question of immortality from the
Gilgamesh epic

33
 Nature in the Waste Land

In addition to his personal difficulties, T.S. Eliot lived through World War I. This
collective experience shaped his mood. It is evident that Eliot witnessed the impact of
this horrible war on western societies. So, for him, he tries to describe this new nature as
"where an entire order of things has crumbled" (Gohar:2). From the very beginning, one
can note the nature that Eliot talks about. It is the nature of hopelessness, despair,
dangers, constraints, wars, and disputes over all things. Referring to The Waste Land,
Khouri writes: "During this period [1922–1939], he published The Waste Land and
"The Hollow Men," poems in which he portrays "the feebleness of human life and the
sterility of civilization" and laments—like someone standing in a grand ancient
cathedral—its waste world (Kadhim, 1999:22). Therefore, I think Eliot in 1922 did not
enjoy what came as a result of the industrial revolution, and The Waste Land comes as
an expression of this nature. Green Kaiser sees Wilson's arguments in The Waste Land
as "a reflection of a disordered mind." (Kaiser:85) In this new and strange nature that
Eliot created, he plants the seeds to tackle the modern problems that face our planet.
Poets from all over the world follow him and transplant their domestic natures. They
incorporate Eliot’s images, and this is what gives the poetry of modern poets it’s
aesthetic.

34
 The Arab Spring and the Waste Land
In The Waste Land, Eliot ironically talks about modernism as a stage that causes the
chaotic aspect of Europe. During this period, people think modernism and the industrial
revolution will bring them prosperity and free life, but on the contrary, modernism
brings decay, psychological collapse, and social collapse to the present and to the next
generation. So, The Waste Land reflects the atmosphere of illusion, uncertainty, and
destruction that shaped that period. Eliot, in his poem, suggests an unlimited number of
philosophical questions related to the moments of rebirth and death to express the
harshest moments of pain at that time.

However, I can say that I find my way to deal with the questions of the Arab Spring
through my reading of Eliot’s spiritual questions in The Waste Land. In his influential
study of "Rewriting the Waste Land," Hussein N. Khadhim (P. 28) talks about the
inhabitants of Eliot’s Waste Land who fear for their lives.

"April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

With spring rain, memory and desire stir dull roots. (WL, I. 1-4)

The inhabitants of this wasteland fear life and the rebirth that the spring rain brings, and
they are content to live in the winter that:

"Kept us warm and covered us."

Feeding the Earth in forgetful snow

A bit of life from dried tubers/ (WL, I. 5-7)

In the same atmosphere, "the Arab inhabitants" live now. We opened our eyes and
hearts when the movements of the Arab people started to throw the old Arab regimes
into the history landfill. So, we proudly called it "the Arab Spring." Life and hope
appear out of nowhere in all Arabs. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and
Libya ended the old regimes, and we were full of hope that these revolutions would end
all forms of the inherited regimes in the Arab World. The Arab people think,
particularly the Palestinians, that the moment of liberation comes and the real change
starts on all levels, and we prepare ourselves for the spring.

We thought the prosperous Arab future was near, but unfortunately, we live in a very
"iced spring." Because these revolutions were not ours to make, restrictions on
intellectuals, women, and ordinary people were tightened. As the Arab Spring
35
transforms our lands into wastelands, thousands of extremists and radicals (Takfiri and
Salafism) worldwide want to impose their ideological vision on the ground by force.
Their minds are cleansed by a religious speech, this time supported by Americans. The
networks of these groups are distributed among the reactionary states. Here is a quick
reaction from an Iraqi citizen when he celebrates the victory of the American army in
2003 and considers it a victory for Iraq. I hope and pray that the Arab people will not be
tricked again by American support for our revolutions. The article was published on
Wednesday, December 3, 2003, under the title "Happy New Year."

"Farewell, 2003; farewell, my most beautiful year. “I’ll mourn your end and sing your
legend as long as I live. You made my greatest dream come true. I know that the coming
years will bring all good to my country, simply because we have put our feet on the
right path.

My death will be a triumph. “My death shall be a victory."

However, I hope that "the Arab Spring" will not disappoint us as much as the Iraqi
people were disappointed after the American-made victory. For me, what I have seen in
"The Arab Spring" 2011 is what Robert Browning, in 1841, saw:

The season is spring.

And now it's morning;

It's seven o'clock in the morning;

The hillsides dew-pearled.

The lark has taken flight;

The snail is perched on a thorn.

God’s in his Heaven

Everything is fine in the world!

And also what Eliot has seen in 1922: "April is the cruelest month," and the Arabs fear
life as much as the inhabitants of Eliot’s Waste Land fear it. The "Arab Spring" adds
new suffering to our nation. Fragmentations in freedom, women's rights, and justice will
shape the Arab face in the coming decades, and the direction of real democracy is lost in
the hands of the new fighters and new authorities. Our people believe that the new
revolutions will lead them away from dictatorship regimes and into a true democracy,
36
but the rest of the Arab world will quickly realize that these revolutions are not ours, and
we will fall back into the arms of the background regimes through American
democracy.

On September 13th, 2012, Michael Crowley described support in the Middle East. "The
Arab Spring is not more than a wash in domestic political terms

37
 Conclusion
Eliot’s Waste Land constituted the real radical change in modern poetry. Many critics
regard Eliot as one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry because of
his great influence. He has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation
of the complexity of modern civilization in language and that such a representation
necessarily leads to such a difficult poem. In his poem, Eliot critiques many aspects of
European society; therefore, he uses allusions and quotations from different cultures to
catch the spirit of obscurity, chaos, disillusionment, and pessimism prevailing after the
holistic war in 1914. It seems that Eliot suggests our need to study these literary texts
deeply to understand the history of a nation. However, in order to express his alienated
view of modern civilization and the challenges that face modern life, Eliot and others
such as Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, Yeats, Comrade, Hopkins, Donne, and others
attempt to respond to the changes and consequences of modern technology, thought, and
the rapid historical changes that involved a wide range of ideas, themes, and subject
matters. So, Eliot in The Waste Land tries to convey civilization’s sense of emptiness,
chaos, confusion, obscurity, and the instability of individual lives. This civilization,
according to Eliot, is aimless. According to the new complexities, The Waste Land
appears to readers to be a difficult poem. Therefore, Eliot tries to create a unification
through his use of old history and philosophies and to remind us of the history of ancient
civilizations. Samir K. Dash (2003) states that Eliot’s use of allusions is related to his
theory of tradition as well as his exploration of the relationship between the past and
present. Moreover, Eliot used the allusions, as I. A. Richards explains, as "a device for
compression, for the poem is equivalent in content to an epic," without which "twelve
books would have been needed." (Samir 2003).

Based on what is mentioned above, I see that the poem was saturated with horrible
social, spiritual, and mythological ideas and that Eliot’s use of symbols, signs, and
myths was a need to escape the determination of the individual's fate by the blind laws
of heredity. Eliot depends on images drawn from modern civilization that are compared
and contrasted with other images drawn from ancient civilizations. Because of that,
"The Waste Land" is characterized by the diversity of themes and structural and
technical devices it utilizes.

From a personal perspective, the passage or the ending of the poem as related to the
poem has moved me, being part of this place at this time, though I think I’ve been doing
similarly so far. What really has moved me is the idea that it is just as corrupt if one uses
the corruption of others to rationalize his own and act accordingly. On the other level, I,
38
though unconsciously, have been doing the same as the protagonist in, of course, my
own sense of what a wasteland is and what "order" is, and in my sense of what is (mine)
"my land" and "the Arab lands." I found the social and religious values a waste of time.
I discovered political parties and ideologies based on benefits, violence, ignorance,
stubbornness, and prejudice (false); I did not participate in what I despise. Escaping in
such conditions is up to me.

Ultimately, I found the ending of the poem, which is about extracting hope out of chaos
and confusion, has many things to do with my own philosophy of life.

39
Primary sources:

1. Abrams et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Third Edition, Vol.
New York: W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989

2. Bayan et al., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 3rd edition, p. New
York: W. W. Norton

Norton & Company, Inc., 1989

3. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael North. NY:
Norton, 2001.

4. Jstor, http://www.jasa.net.au/jabiog.htm (for Jane Austen's biography).

Secondary sources:

1. Brooks, Cleanth, "The Waste Land: An Analysis, T.S. Eliot," ed. B. Rajan Funk
and Wagnall's,1948

2. Brooks, Cleanth, "The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth." Contemporary Poetry
and The Tradition, The University of North Carolina Press, 1939.

3. Elisabeth, Daumer "Charlotte Stearns Eliot and Ash-Wednesday's Lady of

Silences," The Johns Hopkins University Press, 65.2, pp. 479–50, 1998

4. Hume, Amy. "Listening for the "Sound of Water Over a Rock: Heroism and the
role of the reader in "The Waste Land." Ohio University, 2006

5. Jarvis, Jeff, "New Points of View About the Future of Iraq and the Middle East"
Iraq The Model,2003

6. John P. Mc Combe, "Cleopatra and Her Problems: T.S. Eliot and the Fetishization
of Shakespeare,"Peare's "Queen of the Nile" Journal of Modern Literature, 31.2.
Indiana University Press.2008

7. Kaiser, Green, "Disciplining the Waste Land, or How to Lead Critics into
Temptation—T. S. Eliot,” The Frontiers of Criticism, 2006.
40
8. King Joseph T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" as a sexuality critique, poetry
analysis. 2007

9. Knickerbocker, K. L., and Reninger, Harry W., Interpreting Literature

Preliminaries to Literary Judgment, Shorter Edition Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1979

10.Lewis, Pericles, "The Waste Land." Yale University, New Haven, 2010. 11.
McCarthy, Daniel "Does the culture of "The Waste Land" lead to freedom—or
something more?" The American Conservative, 2012.

11.Miller, James. "T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land." Pennsylvania University

Press, 1977. p. 24; 25; 26 "Text, World, Critic," Edward explained.The Bulletin
of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 8.2, pp. 1–23, 1975

12.Samarrai, Ghanim J., "Western Impact on Modern Arabic Poetry": A Postcolonial

Reading of T.S. Eliot's Influence on Badr Shakir Assayyab Sharjah: Government
of Sharjah, Department of Culture and Information, 2009.

13.Semy, Rhee. "Post-War Europe: The Waste Land as a Metaphor." Liberty

University, 2012

14.Simpson, Anita G. "Analysis of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land." 2007

15.Spanos, William. "Repetition in the Waste Land: A Phenomenological

Destruction." Revisions of the Anglo-American Tradition 7 (1979): 225–85

16.. Pooley, Anderson, R.T. C. et al., England in Literature Glenview, Illinois. Scott
Foresman,1968

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42