T.S. Eliot’s Powerful Use of Fragmentation in The Waste Land Essay exam

T.S. Eliots Powerful Use of Fragmentation in The devour drop offT.S. Eliots The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from separate works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and eventide languages. Though this approach seems to render the verse form needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more than straightforward poetic style. Eliots use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels first, to parallel the broken community and relationships the poem portrays second, to deconstruct the readers familiar context, creating an individualized champion of disconnection and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in guileless fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world. On the most superficial level, the verbal fragments in The Waste Land emphasize the fragmented condition of the world the poem describes. Partly because it was written in the aft ermath of World War I, at a time when Europeans sense of security as well as the land itself was in shambles, the poem conveys a sense of disillusionment, confusion, and even despair. The poems disjointed structure expresses these emotions better than the rigidity and clarity of more orthodox writing. This is evinced by the following from the section The Burial of the Dead pass surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain we stop in the colonnadeAnd went on in the sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt Deutsch.And when we were children, staying at the arch-dukes, My cousins, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hol... ...ze anything other than the awful finality of despair. The sense of healing and repurchase at the end of The Waste Land indicates that there is hope for meaning, even in fractured worlds and obfuscated poems. But it is up to each of us to discover it.NOTES1. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Selected Poems (New York Harcourt Brace, 1962).2. In his preface to his notes on The Waste Land, Eliot writes, Not and the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbol of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Westons book on the grail Legend From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Westons book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem a good deal better than my notes can do and I recommend it . . . to any who recollect such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble (68).3. See Eliots notes to The Waste Land.