T.S. Eliot
The Wasteland
During the 1920s T.S. Eliot was noted as one of the greatest poets. At this time he just published his, The Waste Land, which is a known as one of the most important and influential poems in the nineteenth century. T.S. Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis. He attended both Harvard and Oxford and got literary inspirations from his peers in Harvard. From then on he got a job at Lloyd’s Bank which lasted until 1925 when he joined a publishing firm by Faber and Gwyer. In 1929 the firm changed it’s name to Faber and Faber and Eliot was then announced as the director of the firm. Then in 1948 he won a Nobel Prize for “his outstanding, pioneer contribution to to present day poetry.”
The Waste Land is a very allusive and intricate poem that can be interpreted in many ways. A lot of this work was completed with the help of Ezra Pound who helped polished Eliot’s final work. According to Shmoop the subject of this poem is the decline of western culture and the beauty that this culture once possessed. In lines 62-63 in the Norton Anthology he writes:
“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so man,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Eliot makes reference to this in the Norton Anthology that he was referring to Dante, “At the gate of Hell, Dante describes souls in limbo as “‘So long a train of people/ That I should never have believed/ That death had undone so many.’ They are limbo because they “lived without praise or blame” or did not know the faith.”
So he talks about the Lost Generation and the Western Decline and although the world may never be what Eliot may have thought it would turn out to be he still is right about the Lost Generation.
