The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot - 1922

CJ McAninley

Mr. Hart

Honors English 12

24 February 2016

“The Waste Land”

        T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922. As soon as it was published it became one of his most popular poems of his career. This poem is a very lengthy poem and revolves around four sections. The first section deals with death, as the title of the section “Burial of the Dead” indicates. Eliot comes out in the beginning of the poem using very descriptive and dark words indicating to the readers that it is a dark poem. In the next section of the poem “A Game of Chess” Eliot changes the mood in the poem from a dark death feeling to talking about love and sex. In this section Eliot also talks about relationships between the idle rich and the dirt poor. Eliot carries the same theme into the third section “The Fire Sermon” has right away he begins talking about sex again. Eliot opens this section with images that underscore the idea of lovelessness. As he goes into the fourth and shortest section of the poem “Death by Water” he begins to talk about a dead sailor he had mentioned earlier in the poem. Eliot again focuses on death for the theme in this section of the poem even though it only lasts a few lines. Finally Eliot enters the fifth and final section of the poem “What the Thunder Said”. This last section of the poem continues to build on what the poem did throughout and talk about death.

        Many critics had much to say regarding this poem and the themes used in this poem. “There are only two master themes in the poem, which in turn, generate many sub-themes (Hacht).” The one major theme is disillusionment. Eliot states that disillusionment is the current state of affairs in modern society post World War I. He uses death to show disillusionment right away in the first