T s eliot biography wasteland lyrics

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days. Unreal City, under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. Will it bloom this year? A Game of Chess The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed on the marble, where the glass held up by standards wrought with fruited vines from which a golden Cupidon peeped out another hid his eyes behind his wing dubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra reflecting light upon the table as the glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, from satin cases poured in rich profusion.

In vials of ivory and coloured glass unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, unguent, powdered, or liquid — troubled, confused and drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air that freshened from the window, these ascended in fattening the prolonged candle-flames, flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

And other withered stumps of time were told upon the walls; staring forms leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair spread out in fiery points glowed into words, then would be savagely still. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Why do you never speak? What are you thinking of?

What thinking? I never know what you are thinking. What is the wind doing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing? Is there nothing in your head? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? Pound offered him support and friendship; his belief in and admiration for Eliot were enormous.

In turn, however, he radically trimmed Eliot's long first draft nineteen pages, by some accounts , bringing the poem closer to its current version. This is not to say Eliot would not have revised the poem on his own in similar ways; rather, the two men seemed to have genuinely collaborated on molding what was already a loose and at times free-flowing work.

Pound, like Eliot a crucible of modernism, called for compression, ellipsis, reduction. The poem grew yet more cryptic; references that were previously clear now became more obscure. Explanations were out the window. The result was a more difficult work -- but arguably a richer one. Eliot did not take all of Pound's notes, but he did follow his friend's advice enough to turn his sprawling work into a tight, elliptical, and fragmented piece.

Once the poem was completed, Pound lobbied on its behalf, convincing others of its importance. And still she cried, and still the world pursues,. I think we are in rats' alley. Where the dead men lost their bones. The wind under the door. What is the wind doing? I remember. O O O O that Shakespeherian rag—. And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,. Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said—. Hurry up please its time. Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same. And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept But at my back in a cold blast I hear. The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation.

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank. While I was fishing in the dull canal. On a winter evening round behind the gashouse. Musing upon the king my brother's wreck. And on the king my father's death before him. But at my back from time to time I hear. The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring. Sweeney to Mrs. O the moon shone bright on Mrs.

And on her daughter. They wash their feet in soda water. Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants. London: documents at sight,. To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel. I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,. At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives. Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,.

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights. Her stove, and lays out food in tins. As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. I who have sat by Thebes below the wall. When lovely woman stoops to folly and. Paces about her room again, alone,. She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,. And puts a record on the gramophone. And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street ,. The river sweats. Elizabeth and Leicester. Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew. Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees. To Carthage then I came. A description of a journey across the desert is interspersed with references to the death and resurrection of Jesus, implying that the journey has a spiritual element.

The journey ends at a chapel, but it is ruined. Rain finally arrives with the thunder, and its noise is linked with text from the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad , joining Eastern religion with Western. The thunder implores the narrator to "give", but the associated imagery suggests he may already be dead; to "sympathise", but he contends that every person is trapped in their own self-centred prison; and to "control", which is explored with the metaphor of a sailor co-operating with wind and water.

The narrator ends up fishing at the sea shore, having travelled across the desert. He considers taking some form of action in his final question "Shall I at least set my lands in order? The poem ends with fragmentary quotations perhaps suggesting the possibility of new life, and finally the line " Shantih shantih shantih " "Peace peace peace" , the formal ending to an Upanishad.

The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes by Eliot, purporting to explain his own metaphors, references, and allusions. These were included in order to lengthen the work so that it could be published as a book, as well as to pre-empt accusations of plagiarism which his earlier work had been charged with. The style of the poem is marked by the many intertextual allusions and quotations that Eliot included, and their juxtaposition.

The Waste Land is notable for its seemingly disjointed structure, employing a wide variety of voices which are presented sometimes in monologue, dialogue, or with more than two characters speaking. The poem plays with traditional forms of metre and rhyme, often implying blank verse without strictly committing to it especially through quotations of works that are themselves written in such a metre.

Lines are often fragmented, and verses are generally of unequal length, although there are instances of regularity—for example, the first two verses of "The Fire Sermon" are formed like Petrarchan sonnets. As well as drawing from myth and fiction, Eliot included people he knew as figures in the poem. Scholars have identified more contemporary artistic influences on Eliot, contrary to the poet's own focus on older and foreign-language influences.

Eliot was resistant to ascribing any influence to Walt Whitman , instead expressing a preference for Jules Laforgue who was himself a Whitman translator and admirer. As well as the motif of lilacs growing in the spring, Whitman treats the inevitable return of spring as "an occasion for mourning the death that allows for rebirth", a similar perspective being put forward by Eliot and completely contrary to Chaucer, who celebrates the "sweet showers" of April bringing forth spring flowers.

The Waste Land was also informed by developments in the visual arts. Its style and content reflect the methods of Cubism and Futurism to take apart and reassemble their subjects in different forms, and the interest of Surrealism in the unconscious mind and its influence on culture—similar themes to what interested Eliot about The Golden Bough.

In the same sense, The Waste Land directly includes "reality", such as the pub conversation and the phrase "London Bridge is falling down", alongside its "imagined" content, to achieve a similar effect. Interpretations of The Waste Land in the first few decades after its publication had been closely linked to Romance , due to Eliot's prominent acknowledgement of Jessie Weston's book From Ritual to Romance in his notes.

In his notes, Eliot credits Weston's work of comparative religion From Ritual to Romance with inspiring "the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem". The key lesson he is taught is not to speak too much. While out riding one day, Perceval meets two men fishing in a river; they offer him hospitality in a nearby castle.

In the castle hall, he meets the Fisher King, who is gravely wounded. Supernatural events begin to occur: a boy brings a white lance into the hall, and a drop of blood falls from its tip. Two more boys holding candlesticks appear, and then a girl holding a gold grail set with precious stones and radiating light. The grail, in this telling a kind of platter, provides food for the guests in the hall.

Remembering his training, Perceval asks no questions about these strange happenings, and when he awakens the next day he finds the hall empty: his apparent lack of curiosity has been taken as indifference. Perceval returns to Camelot , and while at the Round Table a "loathsome damsel" appears to denounce him, saying that various calamities will occur because the Fisher King cannot defend his lands, still being in his injured state.

As a result, Perceval loses his religious faith. Five years later, Perceval seeks help from his uncle, a hermit. His uncle instructs him in knightly ways, and Perceval receives communion. It was continued in several different versions by various authors. Robert de Boron introduces an explicit link between the grail and Jesus' crucifixion, and in this version Perceval returns to the castle, asks the correct secret question of the Fisher King, and becomes keeper of the grail himself.

Weston interprets the story of the Fisher King as a continuation of pagan fertility rites. She focuses on the idea of a "waste land" surrounding the Fisher King's castle, which will be restored along with the king's health, only after the correct question is asked. In this sense it is a story of death and rebirth, as well as an allegory for reproduction, with the lance representing male genitalia and the grail female.

The Waste Land can be interpreted as being, at least in part, narrated by a Fisher King character, living in a modern industrial "wasted land". The mythic themes of fertility take on a more concrete role in the middle parts of the poem, which deal with scenes of sexuality. Themes of death and regeneration more generally occur throughout The Waste Land , especially in "The Burial of the Dead".

Unlike in fertility myths such as that of the Fisher King, however, "death is never redeemed by any clear salvation, and barrenness is relieved only by a chaotic multiplicity, which is not only an ironic kind of fertility, but is also the distinctly urban chaos that the young Eliot appreciated as conducive to his work. I dislike the word "generation", which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the "disillusionment of a generation", which is nonsense.

I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention. The Waste Land can be read as an expression of post-war disillusionment and anxieties about Western culture. It is an erudite despair. One way in which the poem expresses this disillusionment is in the contrast between its quotations and allusions to older texts and representations of the modern day.

In this way, an idealised past is presented as an unrealistically prelapsarian place, and "modern civilisation does nothing but spoil what was once gracious, lovely, ceremonious and natural. Scholars observe Eliot's depiction of modern London as being an example of these themes as well. The distasteful description of the River Thames in "The Fire Sermon" invites comparison with its beauty in Spenser's day, [ ] and the beautiful Rhinemaidens of Wagner's Ring cycle , who guard gold at the bottom of the Rhine , are ironically placed in the polluted Thames.

Christianity infuses the Fisher King legend, and questions of death and rebirth are central concerns of all religions. The Waste Land also contains allusions to Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which Eliot came into contact with while studying as a postgraduate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard in — Sanskrit quotations from the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, part of the collection of texts known as the Vedas , occur throughout the final section, "What the Thunder Said".

The three words " datta ", " dayadhvam " and " damyata " are an instruction to observe charity, compassion and self-control, and the poem's final line is the same as that of every Upanishad: " Shantih shantih shantih " "peace peace peace". In this reading the poet takes the role of a priest, whose role is to purify the land and release its potential fertility.

The Waste Land is considered to be one of the most important and influential poems of the 20th century. The poem has influenced several prose works. Scott Fitzgerald contains similarities to The Waste Land in its setting "Central to the novel's total effect, as in Eliot's poem, are symbols and images of waste, desolation, and futility" and characterisation "'What do people plan?

What shall we ever do? Lesley Wheeler argues that despite Eliot's large influence on 20th-century poetry, largely due to the success of The Waste Land , his impact on poets this century is much diminished:. As editor, critic, and builder of poetic landmarks from recycled materials, the man overshadowed Anglo-American poetry for generations.

For poets born in the thirties and forties — Craig Raine , Wendy Cope , Derek Walcott , Seamus Heaney — Eliot is monumental, although those writers have different responses to his looming edifice. Poets born since, though, metabolized Eliot differently. It's not that modernism is less relevant. Younger writers claim certain modernist poets over and over: Williams, W.

Eliot just isn't on their public lists quite so often. Wheeler attributes this change to a number of causes, such as Eliot's lower prominence on school curricula, biographies highlighting his antisemitism, and his "misogynistic and homoerotic correspondence with Ezra Pound". Parodies of this poem have also been written. One is by Eliot's contemporary H.

Written in or , it is regarded by scholar S. Joshi to be one of Lovecraft's best satires. Contents move to sidebar hide. The Burial of the Dead. A Game of Chess. The Fire Sermon. Death by Water. What the Thunder Said. Article Talk. Read Edit View history.

T s eliot biography wasteland lyrics

Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. For other uses, see Wasteland. Title page of the first book edition December History [ edit ]. Background [ edit ]. Writing [ edit ]. Editing [ edit ]. Publication [ edit ]. Initial reception [ edit ]. Contents [ edit ]. The Waste Land.