Comment on the Theme and Structure of "The Waste Land".

Eliot's place in the history of English poetry is secured chiefly on the basis that he has evolved a new poetic technique. His approach to poetry was new and revolutionary.

Theme and Structure of the poem The Waste Land:

The mythical technique is the most striking aspect about the poem The

Waste Land. The purpose of the poem was to depict and to convey to the reader the ugliness, the desolation, the emptiness, and the aimlessness of modern life especially in relation to the modern man's attitude to sex and to religion. Eliot conveys this through the uses of various myths.

Technique in Eliot's Poetry:

The technique of symbolism is linked with the use of myths. The waste land is symbolized by the modern city soulless death-in-life. Fire assumes a double symbolism - it purifies as well as destroys. Water too has double significance - it gives life, but it can also drown. Symbols, like the waste land, fire, and water, bind the poem together.

In the poem Eliot develops a new technique the technique of multidimensional allusiveness. The richness of allusions in the poem is a new method of projecting a link between past and present, antiquity and contemporaneity, sterility and fertility, in the life of body and spirit.

Eliot's uses of allusion, adaptation and quotation, serve a double purpose; it is an aspect of tradition as well as of the process of transformation. His uses of quotations from a large number of European writers give profundity and intensity to his poetry. The more modern and personal aspects of his poetry are synthesized with echoes of dead writers, and out of this unconventional combination arises the innovative form of The Waste Land.

Eliot also uses the technique of using a central observer. In The Waste Land it is Tiresias, the inclusive consciousness who was once man and woman, blind but able to foresee the future. He is the spectator, not a character, but he unites the poem in a way.

All the technical devices used by Eliot contribute to a circular shape. The cyclical pattern of the poem is derived from the vegetation and Grail myths. At the conclusion of the poem, we have the feeling that this ending is more like a new beginning because the Words of the Thunder are not final, but just an indication of a possibility.

Eliot borrows ideas and method from a number of past mas and contemporaries, and from different literary genres. But The Waste Land is not governed by the desire to demonstrate the use a these devices. On the contrary, Eliot's use of all these technical devices is subjected to the prime necessity of exploring the basic.