scholarly journals A Qualitative Analysis of the Poem “The Waste Land” to Investigate Spiritual Sterility, Moral Degradation of the Post-war Modern People and the Path of Salvation

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Nazmul Haque ◽  
Fahmida Pervin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Sexual Perversion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Post War ◽  
Relationship Of

This paper’s overriding concern is to analyze the moral degradation, spiritual sterility, fragmentation, damaged psyche of humanity, the disillusionment of early twentieth-century post-war modern Europe and of course the path of salvation that are enormously manifest in the Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’. In the question of regeneration or salvation, Eliot in this poem instructs the morally and spiritually sterile modern man to follow the Indian philosophy, Vedas and Upanishads, the storehouse of knowledge, relief, and source of spiritualism, redemption and salvation. And also he concludes the poem with the sense that if they practise them in their life as instructed, there will be nothing but Shantih, shantih, shantih (peace and tranquility) in their life. This paper thus attempts to dissect how the poem develops exerting the acute sense of spiritual infertility, moral degradation, sexual perversion, meaninglessness in the human relationship of the post-war-devastated and dysfunctional world and concludes with the instruction of the path of salvation.

Queer Surrealism

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-151
Author(s):  
Jesse Matz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Blind Spots

The fantasy that close reading should be some purer, more total encounter with a text is usefully dispelled by readings that achieve their closeness precisely because they have a specific need for proximity with their particular text. As this chapter shows in developing a queer reading of The Waste Land, that ‘need’ might make a reading blind to things that do not suit its purposes, but this blindness must always be a factor even in the purest of close readings. A specific need that has been made explicit has the virtue of calling indirect attention to a reading’s blind spots. The transformation of Eliot’s text from an early twentieth-century moment of non-specific disorientation to a proto-trans opportunity to celebrate bodily transformation is not a violation of the text itself but a valid use for it—an insight into the text itself sharpened by a sense of discursive opportunity.

Marvell in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

2019 ◽  
pp. 772-792
Author(s):  
Steven Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter reviews Marvell’s presence in poetry in English from the early twentieth century down to the present. Beginning with T. S. Eliot’s decisive considerations of Marvell’s significance at the time of the tercentenary of Marvell’s birth, the chapter develops a picture of Marvellian themes which recur thereafter. Eliot’s reflections on Marvell were written as he was working on The Waste Land, and consideration is given to the qualified exploitation of a Marvell-derived ‘wit’ and ‘conceit’ in Eliot’s sequence. The chapter considers the availability of Marvell’s work to writers in this period, from Herbert Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems onwards, to capture the significance of these editions within the writing of such as W. B. Yeats. Having established these complex threads of connection back to Marvell, the chapter then follows them through the work of later poets from Britain, America, Ireland, and the Caribbean including Empson, Ashbery, Gunn, Lowell, Walcott, Hill, Dunn, and Donaghy.

The Only Wonderful Things

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Southwest ◽  
Advertising Agency ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Park Avenue ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
First Time

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

In International Pursuit of a Caliphate

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Age ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Models ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Post War

This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.

‘Making Strange’: Non-Translation in The Waste Land

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Jason Harding
Keyword(s):  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
Reading Key

This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.

‘Even If You Don’t Want to Drink, You Still Have to Drink’

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Invented Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the history of alcohol in Nuosu Yi society in relation to the formal codification of a Yi heritage of alcohol-related culture, and the question of alcohol in Yi health. The relationship of newly invented tradition to older practice and thought is often obscure in studies that lack historical perspective. Examining the historical narratives associated with the exposition of a Yi heritage of alcohol, this study reveals that those narratives are woven from a tapestry of threads with histories of their own, and they therefore shape present-day heritage work. After a brief overview of ideas about alcohol in contemporary discourses on Yi heritage, the chapter then analyses historical texts to argue that many of these ideas are remarkably similar to ones that emerged in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century contact between Yi and Han communities.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Bachelor's Degree ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Postgraduate Studies ◽  
Post War

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an essayist, editor, playwright, poet, and publisher. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He is perhaps best known for his long poem The Waste Land. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Eliot’s postgraduate studies in philosophy took him to the Sorbonne in 1910/11 and to Oxford in 1914. Once he arrived in England, however, he spent much of his time in London. There he met two of the most influential people of his literary life: the American poet Ezra Pound and a young Englishwoman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom Eliot would marry in 1915 after a four-month courtship. Pound encouraged Eliot, who had been planning an academic career, to keep writing poetry and to submit "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Poetry magazine for publication. In addition to writing poetry, Eliot also took a position with Lloyd’s Bank in 1917, managing foreign accounts. Pound and Eliot frequently collaborated and critiqued each other’s work throughout the 1920s and 1930s and remained friends until Eliot’s death, despite divergent political and religious paths. The most famous of these collaborations, The Waste Land, has been documented in a published facsimile edition of the poem (1972) that reveals Pound’s numerous comments on Eliot’s manuscript. The Waste Land is revolutionary both in its form, free verse, and its subject matter, which links urbanization, technology, sexuality, and post-war alienation to dozens of classical allusions in seven languages. The poem is a pastiche of voices and fragments linked both thematically and tonally.

scholarly journals FORD MADOX FORD'S ESSAY ON POETRY AND T.S.ELIOT'S THE WAST LAND

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Rénaux
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
A Minor

The aim of this article is to bring together Ford Madox Ford's essay "Impressionism — Some Speculations", published as a preface to his own Collected Poems (1911) and considered to be "one of the most important critical documents to have been written on modern verse", and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), one of the most celebrated poems of the twentieth century. By comparing both texts, one becomes aware that Ford's esthetic principles become concretized in Eliot's poetry and in this way Ford, although considered a minor poet, has succeeded in his criticism to prognosticate some of the directions Eliot (and consequently a whole generation of poets influenced by him)would follow.

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