T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land †Can We Learn From the Past ? Essay examp

T.S. Eliots The Waste Land Can We Learn From the Past ?And he is not likely to cheat what isTo be done unless he lives in what is notmerely the present, but the present momentof the past, unless he is conscious, not of whatis dead, but what is already living. --T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the psyche Talent When read for the first time, The Waste Land appears to be a concoction of sorts, a disjointed poem. Lines are written in different languages, narrators change, and the scenes calculate disconnected, except for the repeated references to the desert and death. When read over again, however, the pieces become coherent. The Waste Land is categorized as a poem, but exhibited visually, it appears to be a literary collage. And when standing back and viewing the collage from afar, a common theme soon emerges. Eliot collects aspects from different cultures or what he calls cultural memories. These assembled memories depict a dead gentleman, in which the barrenness of these scenes spea k of a wasted condition. He concentrates on women, including examples of violence committed against them and the womens subsequent lack of response to this violence, to show how apathetic the world is. But The Waste Land is not a social commentary on the plight of women. Rather, the womens non-reaction to the violence against them becomes a metaphor for the impotence of the human persist to respond to pain. Violence recurs throughout time, and as Eliot points to in his essay Tradition and Individual Talent in the epigraph, we can break this cycle of violence and chance upon ahead only by learning from the past and applying this knowledge to the present. Form often follows function in poetry, and in this case, Eliot uses this notion whe... ...ing these fragments, he saw how asleep(predicate) he used to be I have heard the keyTurn in the door once and turn once onlyWe count of the key, each in his prison,Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison (412-415)These memories beco me his key to awken the rest of us who are still pretending. The reader is left with ii choices at the end of the poem. S/he can either forget about the poem, and go back to living in a waste land, or s/he can stop repressing pain and feeling and leave the waste land. Eliot ends the poem with a man (maybe himself?) sitting on a shore, fishing, with the arid plain behind me and asking, Shall I at least set my lands in order? (425-36) The man here, by facing his pain, has left the waste land, and is capable to move ahead. Work Cited1 Plato, Republic, in Great Diaologues of Plato (Mentor New York, 1984), 313.