The fragmented feeling of so many references underscores the Lost Generation’s sense of being adrift within a shattered world. Loosely set in post-war London, the poem generates a zombie-like feeling to the city using a wide range of allusions to mythology, religion, history, Eastern and Western theologies, and Elizabethan literature. They voice their fears, their anxieties, their loneliness, and their boredom only to fragment into irrelevancy. In the poem-or, more precisely, the sequence of poems-characters come and then fade. It is a world lost to its God, a world too content with the soul-numbing cycle of lust and dust, a world that too easily turned its collective back on its own glorious cultural past. The world, the poem argues, is a self-created waste land, awaiting some long-shot hope for renewal. In “The Waste Land,” Eliot gave voice to that generation’s disillusionment with civilization and to its certainty that all that remained was the living death of spiritual enervation, malaise, lust, and moral corruption. These artists were stunned by the war’s brutality and were spiritually exhausted by its sheer pointlessness, certain that the depths of its horrors signaled the end to Western civilization. At the time, Eliot was a young American expatriate living in London who belonged to the self-described lost generation of artists and intellectuals who self-consciously called themselves modernists. The poem established Eliot as the preeminent voice of the generation coming to terms with the psychological impact of World War I. The poem itself-notoriously difficult to read given Eliot’s vast erudition and determination to upend all inherited assumptions about the function and form of a poem-is largely a war poem, or more precisely, a post-war poem. No other single poem is more widely read, more widely quoted, more widely imitated, or more widely interpreted. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” published in 1922, stands as the defining English-language poem of the 20th century. By any measure-influence, scope, durability, reputation-T.
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