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A review by _sal_
The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
I don't read much poetry for many times the underlying meaning goes above my head and becuase of this it can become a pretty hard reading experience for me. This time it wasn't any different haha.
I think that through various means i have come to understand the general contextual meanings to some of Eliots poems but i always feel like there is something missing when it comes to my understanding of the work.
In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock we can read and feel a character who is struggling with old age and the consequences of trying to express the unconscious as many of his worries are simply non-existent, like the people laughing at his bald spot, thinning hair, thin legs. I think that after much examining this along with Gerontion are hauntingly melancholic poems that have so much to them other than the struggle of men and their grasp of their younger days.
The parts in The Waste land symbolize the four elements that to people in antiquity was the constituents to the known universe, The Burial of the dead being earth, The Fire Sermon, Death by water, and What the thunder said which can come to symbolize air. I think that perhaps the 2nd part The Game of Chess can come to symbolize who we as humans are but mere chess pieces in the waste land that is the world as seen through a catastrophic event such as World War 1, the scene to many of these elements.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
Just in this alone i feel like there is so much to dissect as April is commonly not known as the cruelest month and it goes to show that the life that you have led prior to reading something like this shapes the way in which you read it for as for me April is spring and spring is the beginning and sprouting of new life but for someone in World War 1 the snow was almost like hibernation, hiding all the corpses and horrors of the war underneath a Beautiful tremulous white.
I still think that i enjoyed this very much and look forward to reading other works.
I think that through various means i have come to understand the general contextual meanings to some of Eliots poems but i always feel like there is something missing when it comes to my understanding of the work.
In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock we can read and feel a character who is struggling with old age and the consequences of trying to express the unconscious as many of his worries are simply non-existent, like the people laughing at his bald spot, thinning hair, thin legs. I think that after much examining this along with Gerontion are hauntingly melancholic poems that have so much to them other than the struggle of men and their grasp of their younger days.
The parts in The Waste land symbolize the four elements that to people in antiquity was the constituents to the known universe, The Burial of the dead being earth, The Fire Sermon, Death by water, and What the thunder said which can come to symbolize air. I think that perhaps the 2nd part The Game of Chess can come to symbolize who we as humans are but mere chess pieces in the waste land that is the world as seen through a catastrophic event such as World War 1, the scene to many of these elements.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
Just in this alone i feel like there is so much to dissect as April is commonly not known as the cruelest month and it goes to show that the life that you have led prior to reading something like this shapes the way in which you read it for as for me April is spring and spring is the beginning and sprouting of new life but for someone in World War 1 the snow was almost like hibernation, hiding all the corpses and horrors of the war underneath a Beautiful tremulous white.
I still think that i enjoyed this very much and look forward to reading other works.