The Waste Land Presents Us with a Portrait of the Modern World Which Is Full of Despair and Isolation
The Waste Land is a poem written in a post-world war society which describes a series of characters, settings, and relationships, the majority of which are sterile and desolate. Appleyard considers the mood that dominates the poem, “The one connecting device is a mood of despair, of barren dislocation”. Within the Waste Land Eliot persistently presents a modern world which is full of isolation and despair using each of the portraits of either settings, characters or through the depiction of relationships to express this attitude up modern society..
The first character we are presented to within the Waste Land is Marie, whose privileged lifestyle and nationality, German, indicated by Eliot’s use of different settings, “Starnbergersee” is used to demonstrate that all of society is negative and his presentation of a society full of despair and isolation is a universal issue. Marie has travelled much of the world and spends her time “in the sunlight…drank coffee and talked for an hour” She reminisces upon a cherished childhood memory where her cousin took her out on a sled and despite being “frightened” he comforted and supported her, this is crucial as it remains the only positive contact Eliot uses within the poem. Eliot contrasts this positive in her past to the misery and seclusion within Marie’s present, where she has no one to reassure and console her, this is evident as she reads “much of the night” due to worry and speculation and goes “south in the winter” to escape. Nellist considers that the time Eliot wrote in differed largely from the past also, “The world in which the poet is writing is a totally different one to the one that past poets inhibited” It’s evident that Eliot has presented a portrait of a modern world profuse in despair and isolation as only her past is portrayed as positive, her present, in the modern world, is full of desolation and loneliness.
Eliot also presents the portrait of society as full of despair and isolation within the next
The first character we are presented to within the Waste Land is Marie, whose privileged lifestyle and nationality, German, indicated by Eliot’s use of different settings, “Starnbergersee” is used to demonstrate that all of society is negative and his presentation of a society full of despair and isolation is a universal issue. Marie has travelled much of the world and spends her time “in the sunlight…drank coffee and talked for an hour” She reminisces upon a cherished childhood memory where her cousin took her out on a sled and despite being “frightened” he comforted and supported her, this is crucial as it remains the only positive contact Eliot uses within the poem. Eliot contrasts this positive in her past to the misery and seclusion within Marie’s present, where she has no one to reassure and console her, this is evident as she reads “much of the night” due to worry and speculation and goes “south in the winter” to escape. Nellist considers that the time Eliot wrote in differed largely from the past also, “The world in which the poet is writing is a totally different one to the one that past poets inhibited” It’s evident that Eliot has presented a portrait of a modern world profuse in despair and isolation as only her past is portrayed as positive, her present, in the modern world, is full of desolation and loneliness.
Eliot also presents the portrait of society as full of despair and isolation within the next