The Waste Land (Modern Critical Interpretations) - Hardcover

T. S. Eliot

3.46

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9781555460389: The Waste Land (Modern Critical Interpretations)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555460380 ISBN 13: 9781555460389

Publisher: Chelsea House Pub, 1986

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Harold Bloom suggests The Waste Land is an American self-elegy masking as a mythological romance, a Romantic crisis poem pretending to be an exercise in Christian irony. Eight other critical views of Eliot's text are offered here.

The title, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on T.S. Eliot, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

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About the Author:

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was one of the fathers of modernism and a defining voice in English-language poetry. He is the author of some of the best known poems in the English language, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, "Ash Wednesday," and Four Quartets. The leading poet of the modernist avant-garde, Eliot radically reimagined the possibilities for literature in the twentieth century and beyond, and was also renowned as a playwright and as a literary and social critic. Eliot's books of criticism include The Sacred Wood, while his theatrical works include Murder in the Cathedral. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Michael North is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, and Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation, as well as many articles on various aspects of twentieth-century literature.

Review:

Long poem by T.S. Eliot, published in 1922, first in London in The Criterion (October), next in New York City in The Dial (November), and finally in book form, with footnotes by Eliot. The 433-line, five-part poem was dedicated to fellow poet Ezra Pound, who helped condense the original manuscript to nearly half its size. It was one of the most influential works of the 20th century. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of fragmentary vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The depiction of spiritual emptiness in the secularized city--the decay of urbs aeterna (the "eternal city")--is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The poem initially met with controversy as its complex and erudite style was alternately denounced for its obscurity and praised for its modernism. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

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