T.S. Eliot’s Powerful Use of Fragmentation in The Waste Land Essay exam

T.S. Eliots Powerful Use of Fragmentation in The untamed consumeT.S. Eliots The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from separate works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and nonetheless languages. Though this approach seems to render the verse form needlessly oblique, this style allows the poetry to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a to a greater extent straightforward poetic style. Eliots use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels first, to parallel the broken party and relationships the poem portrays second, to deconstruct the readers familiar context, creating an individualized nose out of disconnection and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in upright fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world. On the most superficial level, the verbal fragments in The Waste Land emphasize the fragmented condition of the world the poem describes. Partly because it was written i n the aftermath of World War I, at a time when Europeans sense of security as well as the land itself was in shambles, the poem conveys a sense of disillusionment, confusion, and even despair. The poems disjointed structure expresses these emotions better than the rigidity and clarity of more orthodox writing. This is evinced by the following from the section The Burial of the Dead pass surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain we halt in the colonnadeAnd went on in the sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, documented Deutsch.And when we were children, staying at the arch-dukes, My cousins, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hol... ...ze anything other than the awful finality of despair. The sense of healing and redemption at the end of The Waste Land indicates that there is hope for meaning, even in fractured worlds and obfuscated poems. But it is up to each of us to discover it.NOTES1. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Selected Poems (New York Harcourt Brace, 1962).2. In his preface to his notes on The Waste Land, Eliot writes, Not hardly the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbol of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Westons book on the grail Legend From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Westons book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do and I recommend it . . . to any who gauge such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble (68).3. See Eliots notes to The Waste Land.