The Waste Land Essays

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a complex and fragmented poem that underwent major revisions before it was published in 1922. The published version we see and read today is considerably shorter in comparison to what Eliot had originally written. According to James Torrens’s article “The Hidden Years of the Waste Land Manuscript,” Eliot had mailed “54 pages of The Waste Land, including the unused parts” to John Quinn, a “corporation lawyer in New York City,” which had shortly disappeared after Quinn’s

T.S. Eliot and the Great Gatsby Fitzgerald’s use of T.S. Eliot and his poem, “The Waste Land”, serves a great purpose of adding symbolism and developing themes in his novel The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald tells of a part of the city, which he calls the Valley of Ashes. He explains it as being a type of waste land, using an allusion to the poem, “The Waste Land”. Above the valley of ashes hangs a large billboard of an optometrist advertisement. The advertisement portrays an image of the optometrist

Waste land is the British-Brazilian documentary film made by Lucy Walker. The film story told that artist Vik Muniz, he travelled to the largest landfill in the world, outside of Rio de Janeiro, to collaborate together with lively group members of catadores (waste picker) of recyclable material, who find ways to the most famous and prestigious auction house in London via some surprising transformations of waste into contemporary art. The work of catadores in a cooperative led and founded by the Association

A small or large experience can change the way that you view life and can even change the way you live it. I learned this by watching the 2010 documentary film Waste land, directed by Karen Harley and produced by Angus Aynsley, which tells the story of six garbage pickers, catadores, working at the largest landfill in the world, Jardim Gramacho, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This documentary tells the story of people from different backgrounds, ranging from a president of the Association

on the world for its full regards or none. Modernist writers like T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams explained the deepness a human can feel when alive and/or dead, inside or outside. Eliot showed these deprivations in his famous poem, “The Waste Land,” specifically with “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game of Chess.” Williams directly told his readers the abstracts of the world in its involvement in a person’s life, unlike Eliot. These two writers shared the memos of the modern people away from

Mad Men and The Waste Land depict two modernist themes: decay and apathy – the depiction of these two themes are different in each work. The Waste Land is a post-WWI poem that depicts a pessimistic approach on how people ought to live – focuses on European culture. Mad Men is a TV show that explores American culture and takes place during the beginning of the Vietnam War. After thorough scrutiny of the two works, it appears that war is the major cause of the challenging and onerous nature of the

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil is home to one of the largest wastelands in the world. In Lucy Walkers, Waste Land (2010), she gives insight into the lives that exist amongst that garbage and what little inspiration they have left for life. In order to provide the Catadores (pickers) of Jardim Gramacho (community/garbage tip) with a new found motivation for a better way of living, Walker, along with the infamous artist, Vik Muniz and his team, travel to Rio De Janeiro to put to practice the concept of turning

Think about what dirt is, unimportant debris. No! dirt is the foundation of all life, but its importance is overlooked. Sharon Olds, author of the poem "Ode to Dirt", tells of her point of view on dirt and how it has changed after realizing it, comparing it with other importances in nature. In "Ode to Dirt" Olds uses metaphors, personification, and word choices to change the general opinion about what dirt is. Olds uses metaphors to transcend the literal meaning of dirt and also to try to increase

The wasteland is presents a more accurate portrayal of the poem in the movie or the book? Is more accurately portrayed in the book and this is why. The valley of ashes is symbolic of the lives of material and spiritual waste characteristic of many on the East Coast. Much like his narrator Nick Carraway. Fitzgerald found the affluent Easterners in their love of materialism in the setting of 1922. The valley of ashes is a virtual wasteland of the industrial products produced in and for New York

In "Ode to Dirt," Sharon Olds explores the complexities of dirt through her use of figurative language and word choice to demonstrate how her attitude towards dirt has changed over time. As the poem progresses, she begins to realize the importance of dirt in the world. In the beginning of the ode, Olds apologizes to the dirt for having "slighted" it. She saw it as "only the background for leading characters." Similarly, she describes how she only pays attention to the stars, but not the sky

T.S. Eliot was born in 1888; he was an essayist, poet, literary and social critic and is viewed as one of the greatest modernist writers of his time. His poem, “The Wasteland” is considered to be one of the most important modernist poems of the twentieth century and reflects the supposedly fragile psychological state of humanity in this time. Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” during an era in human history that was unlike any other that had come before. World War 1, also known as the Great War was one

Post-Modern writing often appears vague in nature, permitting the reader to infer deeper meanings upon reading the work, again and again. One feels compelled to reread the work, to better comprehend what is said in a just few sparse lines, as with Margaret Atwood’s very short poem, “You Fit into Me”. At first, the poem’s four lines appear to be deceptively simplistic in form, even a bit trite. Yet, when taking a closer look at the poem, it becomes clear that it’s so much more complex than it seems

In his timeless poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us”, William Wordsworth bemoans the state of the world and how people so ignore creation. Wordsworth was an English poet in the in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His childhood was a traumatic time as he moved from one place to another after the tragic death of his mother. As he grew older, so did his passion for poetry and he soon published in a magazine when he was only seventeen. Despite stains on his character, including a

Macbeth is a play written during the 16th century by William Shakespeare. As similar to other plays written by Shakespeare, the play is not totally original. They came from facts and events that are happening during the time it was written (“Background to Macbeth”). Macbeth can be seen as a dark play as it portrays the idea of evilness through characterization and have events like murder happening throughout the story. Throughout the play, Shakespeare inserted various features to make his writing

According to Susan Dick, Woolf’s narrator moves freely among the characters, entering their minds and using a subtle blend of quoted and narrated monologue, supplemented by description, to reveal their inner lives. Readers know the characters as they know themselves and as they are known to one another. Although the narrator places the characters in the foreground of the narrative and generally blends her voice with theirs, she also maintains an independent point of view which enables her to speak

solution to their trash problem, but he never once stopped to think about or offer a solution to the problem. All he did was get them to continue to work picking up the trash and using it to create his art project. Vik Muniz did not help the people in Waste Land address the problems they face on the daily basis. He instead hired only certain people to appear on camera and work for him, so he could create an art project. Once they created the art project it was very unclear how this would have benefited

The Great Gatsby by Scott F. Fitzgerald and The Waste Land by T.S Eliot both use imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism to explore how the higher you go in the social ladder, the more corrupt and immoral life gets. Fitzgerald uses imagery to describe Myrtle coming down the stairs of her husband George Wilson’s shop. “Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crépe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her

Waste Land shows the lives of some of the poorest people in Rio de Janeiro. They call themselves pickers because they spend their days picking through trash that comes to the Jardim Gramacho dump. The pickers live in extreme poverty, and the only money they earn comes from collecting recyclables. They struggle through everyday life with little to no assistance from their government, and with other classes looking down on them with judgment. Vik Muniz understands these struggles first hand, and decides

Waste land is a movie that wants to reflect the importance of art in society. The words garbage, unusual art and hope could define the movie. Waste land shows life in Jardim Gramacho, Brazil. Recycling materials pickers, in Brazil known as catadores, are the subject matter of this documentary and Vik Muniz is the artist that transform their life and world’s perspective about “trash” collectors. Vik Muniz is one the better Brazilian artist that was born into a middle-low class family in Sao Paulo

my dialectical method, as I understand it , is a constant building up and breaking up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time… Out of the inevitable conflict of images—inevitable because of the creative, re creative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of war—I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem. (Dylan Thomas, Letter to Treece 157-158) The whole passage