T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an imperative breakthrough in the history of English poetry and one of the most deliberated poems of the twentieth century. It is a long poem of about four hundred forty lines in the five parts entitled 1) The Burial of the dead, 2) A Game of Chess, 3) The Fire Sermon, 4) Death by Water and 5) What the Thunder said. The poet was just recovering after a serious breakdown in health, caused by domestic worries and over-work in Lausanne, Switzerland while it was written in the autumn of 1921. Personal health crisis, the mental instability of his wife, who ultimately died in a mental hospital, and the nerve shattering impact of the WW-I, all account of the depressing and …show more content…
S. Eliot is a modernist poet with numerous works to his credit and the masterpiece is The Waste Land crowning him as the greatest poet in the twentieth century. Eliot fulfilled his self-imposed duties by using the materials of the city life to build up his poetry. The ecological theme of Eliot’s The Waste Land is very rarely discovered which tries to probe this espousing theme of literary criticism. Eliot has splattered an ecological inequilibrium and a world which has not regenerated in The Waste Land. He employs his diverse talent and poetic gifts and creations to show his great ecological concerns towards the depressing, estranged and depreciating …show more content…
It is said that on the eve of the composition of The Waste Land T.S. Eliot had been reading Jessie Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance, and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Eliot has accredited that he was profoundly influenced by these anthropology and the ancient mythologies and legends which form the mythical background of the poem. “In the fertility myth spring is associated with the growth of potency in the fisher King and with the fertility of his land. However, these events are anticipated with fear rather than hope, and thus April seems cruel rather than kind.” (Shahane- 26) The first section of The Waste Land endeavors to describe and interpret the burial of the dead gods of fertility as narrated by James Frazer in the Golden Bough (London, 1960, p-428). According to Cleanth Brooks, the theme of the first section is ‘the attractiveness of the death’ or ‘the difficulty in rousing oneself from the death in life in which the people of the waste land