The Waste Land....ummmm....uhhhhh....yeaaaaa....

Upon reading this I initially thought “Wow this isn’t that bad. I’m enjoying this and I get what he is saying.” However, before I got to chapter II I realized I was wrong and soon began to hate how confusing it would get. It may have been because my brain is a bit fried due to mid-terms but I would read entire chapters and made no sense of them. In regards to ways he is different from other modernists is that I found he doesn’t say things straight forward. The modernists’ movement seemed like there was a pretty universal understanding that a message should be presented without all the extra verbal foliage. Everything was either a metaphor or an allusion or both. These were used by other modernists but their poetry never depended on it like this did. Also one thing I noticed about this that I hadn’t seen before was that it was like a mobius strip. It tended to loop back over the same stuff and end where it began but it was always changing as well. I enjoyed that form.

Ways in which it embodied modernism was that it still struggles with where humanity is going and that whole depersonalization. Another way is that he conveys feelings and thoughts without simply explaining them. The modernists tended to go for the feelings and thoughts that can’t be explained only conveyed by examples and literary devices. He gave a real sense of detachment. An example of how he conveys something you can’t simply describe is the entirety of chapter II. He puts you in the moment and there is soooo much tension going on between him and the woman. He made it seem like he was being hunted or stalked in some way. He was the pray and she was the hunter. It can be described but you can never fully understand it unless you are put there in that situation. He does that very well. I’m not sure what else to say about it. I’ve pretty much read through it twice so far and I feel like I would need to have a conversation about it and analyze it with other people before I could understand it any better. If this isn’t in depth enough then after next class I think I could revise this and could go much more in depth. At this point though I’m stuck.