An Academic Essay on Fragmentation in The Wasteland
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins” – T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
For today’s post, I’ve revisited another old essay from my time in academia. In my very first year of university, in one of the most life changing English classes I’ve taken to date, we studied T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Wasteland. The essay I wrote explores the fragmented structure and context, as well as the history that influenced the poem.
T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is perhaps best well known as marking the foundation of modern poetry. This is due to the, at the time, unconventional way that it is written. Free style with no specific structure of a rhyme scheme, its obscure and constantly changing narrators, and lack of a specific location of time create the unmistakable markers. These aspects contribute to why the poem is detached, or fragmented: because ultimately, it is an amalgamation of a large number of points of views, themes, and emotions. It is a collection of borrowed images, words, and phrases all meshed together. Some would say that perhaps, it is not even a poem. However, I believe that despite the qualities that seem to make it seemingly disjointed, The Wasteland is in no means short of being a poem: because although the reader may not completely understand everything in it, Eliot still manages to allow us to relate to it in some way. It is, after all, a commentary on modern life. I believe that the fragmentation is what unifies the poem, and is evident both visually and perceptually.
The first thing a reader might notice is the visual structure of The Wasteland. The fragmentation of paragraphs is not so apparent until the second part, A Game of Chess (110 – 140), but from thereon the jumpy structure becomes more and more noticeable. Eliot often goes from short lines, with as little as one or two words that cut off at unnatural times (“Do; “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember; “Nothing?”; I remember;” 121 – 124) to long sentences, within mere seconds. In Part II we see the line “Hurry up please it’s time” (141, 152, 165, 166) written in capital letters, which is one of two lines written this way. Eliot is constantly introducing new formats throughout the poem, and most of time, are not repeated again. Part I begins with a more typical, symmetrical format, but rapidly changes, keeping the readers on their toes in unexpected ways.
At this point, one should consider the literal title of the poem: a wasteland, a land that has been destroyed. A wasteland is a barren land where remnants of life once existed, where shards of broken things are scattered within. This was the result of the Second World War, as Eliot had written this poem during the aftermath. These broken things have been pieced together to create one cohesive poem, as a commentary on how the world was coping with the horrifying effects the war had made on it. Little pieces are meshed with big pieces, and yet sometimes it seems as if the puzzle pieces are being forced to fit together, much like the way that people were trying to fix the world after the war. Creating the feeling of the broken and reassembled is extremely important to the poem, and is emphasized in the visual and literary structure.
The unannounced, changing speakers makes for confusion, forcing us to adapt as we read. Eliot eases into different languages (Latin, Italian, German, French, and Sanskrit) without any translation on the page to aid the reader. This adds to the detachedness, since it’s very possible that the reader cannot understand these foreign words. The words that seem nonsensical such as the repetition of the word “Twit” and “Jug” (203 – 204) frustrate the reader, because they are not able to not know the meaning of these words in the context. Perhaps there is no meaning at all, and this in itself is a new-fangled concept in terms of poetry, which is typically a form of writing that advocates whittling text down to its most important words.
The emotions throughout the poem are not under one consistent tone, possibly mimicking the myriad of sentiments about the impact of the war. “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images” (19 – 22). The world is affected by the repercussions of World War II, and it seems Eliot is saying that the common man of the era, the man of modernity, cannot understand what his poem is about. That in modern times, nobody knows more than the concrete jungle that surrounds them. They cannot make out a meaning out of Eliot’s poem, what with the constant references to other literature, bits of songs and chants, and foreign languages. Eliot is calling the readers out for not having patience to figure out the poem’s meaning.
After a few readings, one realizes that there is more cohesiveness in the poem than is initially let on. There are overarching themes that Eliot explores throughout. For example, the epigraph, when translated from Latin, tells us a story about a woman who grows old but will never die; and when asked what she wants most, she says that she wants to die. The prophecy of death is brought up in Part I, and is carried through until Part IV (eg. “death by water”). It is difficult to understand everything that Eliot writes in this poem, and that’s what I believe frustrates readers the most – what makes it seem so disjointed. But that seems to be Eliot’s aim. The beauty in the poem is that; after two world wars, it seems to imply that we as a human race will never understand anything to its full extent.
The world was deeply affected by the war; it was a traumatic shock to all. Countries had been destroyed and a terrifying number of people had been brutally killed, so this naturally drew out a slew of emotions from everyone: this is what The Wasteland embodies, literarily and visually. The repetition of words and sentences seems to convey a feeling of insanity on the narrator’s part. The theme of death is constant throughout the text, looming through undertones and overtones. Though the rhyme scheme is constantly and almost instantly changing, and it is hard to recognize a pattern (eg. ABA, ABB), the poem still flows in a rhythm. One may become befuddled with the change of pace, but Eliot manages to make the words sound natural when read aloud, not forced like some strictly formed poems do. Even in part I, The Burial of the Dead, Eliot constantly changes the number of lines in his stanzas; they act more as a story than a poem.
The fact that Eliot is constantly alluding to other literary works throughout the poem, which readers may not pick up on, can attribute to its detachedness. Because of course, knowing what he is referencing makes the poem that much more understandable, but in the end, it is still a poem that is comprised of bits and pieces, of fragments of other people’s lives and opinions. Interestingly enough, what I believe unifies the poem is the fragmentation itself; The Wasteland in itself can be literally seen as a wasteland. A contradictory, overlapping and confused world. In the end, it seems that fragmentation is not one of the poems flaws, but rather one of its major themes – and this mastery is what makes Eliot such a true artist.
~ Z ~
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, Prufrock, and other poems . Dover ed. New York: Dover Publications, 1998. 31 – 42. Print.
Photo by Logan McKnight
