T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

T.S. Eliots The Waste Land - Essay ExampleAttractive to underway readers insofar as it resists coherence, the poem has lately been interpreted as a critique of literary and sexual proprieties. It lacks respect for tradition, is fascinated with mutation, degradation, and fragmentation, split between a longing for improper sexual desires and a wish to be rid of them. (Charles W. Pollard, 2003, pp 90-110).In a curious twist of literary history, recent critics of The Waste Land shoot returned to the questions that concerned its initial readers, before its elevation to the status of a classic. Troubled by its disorderliness and its debasement of literary value, Eliot inserts beautiful quotations into ugly contexts, and that his poem is a considerable affront against aesthetic sensibilities. Trying to recapture this sense of The Waste Lands offensiveness, critics at the end of the century stress its chaotic structure, its multiple voices, and its internal conflicts, which offer it an unfinalized, open text. In so doing, however, they continue to beat a dead horse.