Discuss the features which gave complexity to the poem The Waste Land.

Complexity of the poem –

The Waste Land

• The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the moral basis, coherence, and durability of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world.
• The standard syntactic flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances and substituted for the traditional type of coherent poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of parts, in which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the reader to discover, or invent.

• T.S.Eliot believed that poetry should express the intricacy and complexity of life and hence poetry in the modern age was bound to be complex.

• Poetry which expresses simple thought in simple manner is not good poetry to Eliot – his complexity is deliberate

• Obscurity or complexity arises from:
• Rigorous compression (ed by Ezra Pound) – who speaks to whom?, incoherent, confused and meaningless…
• interior monologue – through this device – what passes through in the unconsciousness of Tiresisas
• Mythical method: three mythical waste lands – Sybil.
• Allusions from East and west: carthage, other cities, Himavant, Ganga, Fire sermon, thunder,  Philomel, hyacinth…
• Symbols: unreal city, falling London bridge, tarot card, metropole hotel, heart throbbing like engine,
• Collage of various images: