This blog is in response to the google classroom activity of The Waste Land which briefly shows the views of Eliot himself and Nietzche over historical myths , culture and tradition as well .It also contains the overview about the poem.
🔎Poem overview :
The Waste Land is an epic poem. Broken into five main parts with 434 lines, The Waste Land is one seriously long poem. Epic poems are generally lengthy narrative poems, and Eliot's poem could certainly be classified as such, even though the poem itself does not follow any sort of defined story line and it is considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century, as well as a modernist masterpiece. A dramatic monologue that changes speakers, locations, and times throughout,
“The Waste Land” draws on a dizzying array of literary, musical, historical, and popular cultural allusions in order to present the terror, futility, and alienation of modern life in the wake of World War I.
🔎Central theme of the poem :
The Central theme of the poem is Rebirth. The Christ images in the poem, along with the many other religious metaphors, posit rebirth and resurrection as central themes. The Waste Land lies fallow and the Fisher King is impotent; what is needed is a new beginning. Water, for one, can bring about that rebirth, but it can also destroy.
- I. The Burial of the Dead
- II. A Game of Chess
- III. The Fire Sermon
- IV. Death by Water
- V. What the Thunder Said
1) What are your views on the following image after reading 'The Waste Land'? Do you think that Eliot is regressive as compared to Nietzche's views? or Has Eliot achieved universality of thought by recalling mytho-historical answer to the contemporary malaise?
Friedrich Nietzsche, in a passage from his 1887 work On the Genealogy of Morals, set the stage for twentieth-century thought and rejected the possibility of an absolute, objective truth:
" There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our concept of this thing, our objectivity be. "
Nietzsche’s goal in this passage was for his readers to make greater demands upon themselves in their explorations and evaluations of subjects; he insisted they consider a multiplicity of viewpoints in the process of formulating their own. One, however, also infers that an individual perspective takes only a relative view of its subject and it is inherently limited it enjoys no privilege over other views and ultimately it is reflective only of the circumstances in which it is made.
Eliot implicitly accepted Nietzsche’s view of a more complete objectivity being embodied by multiple perspectives. In his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he describes the poet’s mind as a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. In poetry, he writes:
"Experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. "
In short, poetry is the coalescence of multiple perspectives into a single, coherent, and, above all, objective view.
I find Nietzsche’s concept of “Ubermensch” appropriate. As this concept talking about to have our own morality for the betterment of humanity and our self. The morality which generally accepted and not harmful for society. To have faith in our self make us more powerful to fight against the problems around us and to control our self. So as per my thinking it is better to find new solution rather than going back to the old ones as they will not work for contemporary time same as they didn’t work for old time.
(2) Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish Academy made these remarks:
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