6/4/2023 0 Comments Eliot after the waste landI’ll try to talk about the poem in sequence from first section to last and at least tell you some of the ways in which I make sense of it. I began last time by talking about that first verse paragraph of the poem. “The Waste Land”: The Burial of the Dead And indeed, The Waste Land, which is a poem that in certain ways tries to imagine a form of private ritual, or at least struggles with this question, was certainly considered by some readers to be a neurotic poem. Is it possible for the individual to produce some kind of shared patterning of experience such as ritual represents? For Freud, who is, of course, a thinker in the background of The Waste Land and all of the poetry that we’re reading and thinking about this semester, private ritual meant neurosis, sickness of a kind, some kind of derangement. Professor Langdon Hammer: Is private ritual possible? This is a kind of oxymoron, “a private ritual,” because ritual is, or should be, precisely something that’s collective and shared. Modern Poetry ENGL 310 - Lecture 12 - T.S.
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