You must be willing to sacrifice and accept that things may get worse before they get better. "…to be restored, our sickness must grow worse" Eliot writes, and this is actually a recipe for emotional health albeit nothing close to that was to be found in the Wasteland. Indeed the world "become stranger" and the pattern of our lives becomes "more complicated" as we grow older. But these are words that sound like philosophy, not the remorse that was saturated throughout the Wasteland.
The Dry Salvages -- Number Three of Four Quartets
In the Wasteland there was no water to be found. Not a drop of water -- just rock and dust and death. And yet here in number three of the four quartets the water is everywhere, even "within us" and "all about us." Eliot wrote this on the northeast coast of Massachusetts, and he is drenched in images of life, water, hope, and quite a contrast to the dry darkness of the Wasteland. Here in this section again Eliot has fulfilled his need to be hopeful albeit he is never far from skepticism and cryptic thoughts. In this section readers learn that the people in the city, who "worship the machine" (live in the industrial world), do not honor the natural world. So what? At least Eliot is referencing the world that is alive and not dead or dying. His poetry is brilliant no matter what his theme is, but it is indeed refreshing to read about the animals that come from the sea. By mentioning the starfish, the seagull, the horseshoe crab, and whales and sea anemone -- not to mention lobsters -- Eliot is suddenly the quintessential romantic living on the coast of Massachusetts. "We cannot think of a time that is oceanless or of an ocean not littered with wastage," he warns, after painting a lively, fulfilling picture of all the wonderful natural life that thrives at the ocean's edge and in the deep ocean waters.
Little Gidding -- Number Four of Four Quartets
Even though the winter sun shines only a short time compared with the summer sun, that winter sun turns the ice to flame in this opening stanza. That is a brilliant allusion, and again it can be said that Eliot has become fulfilled. In the Wasteland Eliot could have used a little sunshine to light up his spirits -- spirits that had been darkened by the gloom of war. He hated spring in the Wasteland. In this poem May brings "voluptuary sweetness" -- the virtual opposite of his tone in the Wasteland. "What we call the beginning is often the end" he writes, and "the end is where we start from."
Conclusion and Result
Indeed, the end of the Wasteland has become the beginning of a far more fruitful, positive journey through the music of the Four Quartets. "All manner of things shall be well" when "the fire and the roses are one." The result of T.S. Eliot's work is that critics say he was among the most brilliant poets in the 20th Century, but he did not accumulate a portfolio of poems as lengthy as he could have, according to the critics.
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. "Four Quartets."
Eliot, T.S. "The Wasteland."
Lewis, Pericles. "The Waste Land." Modernism Lab Essays. (2005). Retrieved Feb.
15, 2010, from http://modernism.research.yale.edu.
T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell The poetic styles of T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell are so dissimilar, that it comes as something of a shock to realize how much the two poets had in common. Each came from a prominent Boston family, and was related to a President of Harvard University -- Eliot was a distant relation to Harvard's President Eliot, and attended Harvard as an undergraduate: Amy Lowell's brother would
TS Eliot REVISED "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot is indefeasibly a Modernist masterpiece. Yet how do we know it is modernist? Let me count the ways. Modernist poetry is often marked by complicated or difficult disjunctions in tone -- "J. Alfred Prufrock" which is capable of moodily swinging from the depressive lows of "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the
T.S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine The late nineteenth century Symbolist movement in literature was first identified as the primary origin of twentieth century Modernism by Edmund Wilson, in his 1931 work Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. Wilson's study ranges widely enough to cover the Modernist prose of Proust and Joyce in addition to the experimental prose-poetry of Gertrude Stein, but he makes a particularly strong case
Sketch of T.S Eliot The Life of T.S Eliot Eliot was born in Missouri in 1888. He studied philosophy and logic at various universities including Harvard. After graduating he spent a year at Sorbonne in Paris reading French literature. He then returned to Harvard where he studied epistemological theory, Indian languages and metaphysics. He later transferred to Oxford where he studied Greek philosophy (Kamm 143). During these years of study he also
This is the case with Gabriel in "The Dead" as well. Throughout much of the action of the story, Gabriel appears at a loss as to who he is, which is directly related to how he is perceived. The first time in the story this is noticed is to the beginning, when he gives a coin to Lily out of an unspecified yet apparently selfless motive. Gabriel wants to share
"On receiving news of the war" by Isaac Rosenberg Rosenberg's poem conjures up a physical, metaphorical image of the specter of war. A spirit of a person torn by the red fangs of either death, war, or some diabolical, physically imagined agent hangs over the poem. This dead spirit, representing all of the fallen soldiers, is in neither heaven nor hell (suggesting a crisis of faith in this modernist poem) but
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now