I don't know if I'm crazy but I actually enjoyed The Wasteland. After realizing that The Wasteland describes the depressing mood set after WWI, I began to have so much more interest and sympathy for the characters as they live their miserably monotonous life which is slowly driving them all crazy. The language and connections Eliot makes to other writers' work is astounding and truly gives me a better understanding of the horrors of the antebellum time period. My favorite reference was to Dante's Inferno in which he says "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many". Here Elliot is saying that life is equal to purgatory except instead of waiting to be placed in heaven or hell people are waiting to die as they all slowly go insane. In What The Thunder Said, Elliot says "He who was living is now dead/ we who were living are now dying/ With a little patience/ Here is no water but only rock". By this, He means that there is no longer anything in life worth living for, there is nothing good. So the only way to end the monotonous cycle of life, "crowds of people, walking round in a ring", is to die.
Ps. I commented on Rebecca and Jamie
Ps. I commented on Rebecca and Jamie
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I don't normally tend to enjoy reading such heavy material, but The Wasteland was oddly enjoyable. It seems strange for me to say "Death by Water" was my favorite out of the five poems, but that one held my attention and had me contemplating the longest.