I am confused how something that seems so unorganized gets so much acclaim. What am I missing?
You are missing a lot. Read more closely. It isn't a children's narrative that you can understand simply by skimming through the plot.
what youre missing is that the emperor has no clothes
>>7857514
>It isn't a children's narrative that you can understand simply by skimming through the plot.
I get that. I've read it through multiple times. I get it, I just think that it's sloppy, some of it particularly redundant for my taste. Subtlety gets lost in repetition.
>>7857515
This is always a vapid, lazy criticism no matter what
>>7857532
Same anon as above.
I was in your boat before. I had read the poem several times and enjoyed the language but never got much else out of it. What helped me, and what I'd recommend that you do too, was to memorize it. Eliot is tough for me and he required more concentrated thought that I seem to be able to give him when merely reading. Internalizing the poem and forcing myself to carefully analyze each line changed the game for me. That is what I now do for all of his poetry. I'm working toward having all of it by heart.
>>7857532
The whole point of the poem is that it is dislocated and repetitive, don't expect it to throw the answers at you. It takes 20 minutes to read it but a lot longer after that actually getting to the bottom of the themes and criticism. Also don't get too bogged down in the intertextuality, even though sometimes it's useful to work on it, especially in the last 15 lines.
>>7857507
Well, Eliot was young and insecure when he wrote it. All those voices, that cacophony, and disorder exist only to hide the fact that the poem is very simple; it's about failed sexuality, frustrated love and the sordid mundanity which flood the world. Thought, through this desolation, there's a reconciliation by the awareness, finding at last beauty in the pain and hope in the dispair. This is done using monern techniques that in a sense deny the form in favor of more vivid images.
I prefer Four quartets" since it tends to favor the established form, the execution over the fragmentation, suggestion and intention.
>>7857507
The coherence of its structure is realised in much the same way as Joyce's Ulysses. While the latter had for its referential myth the trials of Odysseus, the fragmented voices of The Waste Land are brought into unity by the arthurian fable of the fisher king and the holy grail.
>'I sat upon the shore fishing, with the arid plain behind me. Shall I set my lands in order?'
[Image of a tiny penis]
>>7860084
well done, lad
>>7860087
Thanks American Politician.
the first part is pretty much /the/ poem
I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by call centres,
Data entry and misappropriated dreams;
Starving hysterical, souls naked
in the six seconds swing
Between cold-calls that link Monday through
Friday in a loop around the throat
Where screams die, anguish quenched by
pill-popping weekends chopped
Into white powder dawns that defy time with
the stretching of inhibitions and wages.
Dragging themselves through the suburban
streets at dawn
Never wanting for an angry fix, always
available to mainline
If not prescription or addiction,
Then mere cavalcades of enhanced, superseded
glory and infinite division.
Angleheaded hipsters in our minds, burning
for the ancient heavenly connection
To the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night,
But unavoidably severed from its motion,
Blind to the deus ex machina,
Who belly-fat and dream thin
Watch unimagined repetitious attempts
To mount the steaming cunt of destiny
And take her for a ride worth living in;
A life like the one they repeat endlessly
on nostalgia TV channels,
Yet more drugs for the eyes
and for the ambitions.
Medicated until the world is no longer
worth sinning in,
Forgetting all the pent-up energies
of our half-religious parents
In the bare carefree moments of beginning
we call 'week's ending'.
And oh, they end endless,
Always finished just before
the dawn of Monday
Calls us to the factories
in which our minds are chained.
Up chain-smoking in the supernatural darkness
of multiple occupancy flats
Contemplating techno and
electronic abstractions,
Who bared their brains to Michael Moore and
Tony Blair, only to be colonised
By Thatcher from beyond the grave,
forced by guilt
To believe in a passive aggressive liberalism
that hates its own existence,
Those who see Mohammedan angels
Staggering on tenement roofs illuminated
Call the terrorist orange alert hotline,
inspiring dawn riads
And the bloodied, sundered chests
of those innocent, bearded idolators
Who perversely cling to the sacred,
even though we have
Profaned it with our politics,
Our need to stay afloat above extinction:
It does not matter who got there first...
Who passed through universities
with radiant cool eyes
Hallucinating Barthes,
dying to be as cool as Kerouac
Among the scholars of war;
which became everybody's discipline
The moment the need for tragedy
in our own existence
Polarised the blind from the indifferent.
Who were never expelled from the academies
for publishing
Obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
too nervous even to graffiti
All but meaningless phrases,
scrawled importunings and failed seekings,
Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
Worshipping their money in wastebaskets
As debts mounted like
a terror through the wall:
Perhaps another dawn raid,
Who will they come seeking
at six tomorrow morning
Armed with ASBOs and deportation orders?
Who got busted in their pubic beards
returning from Bristol with a pinch
Of marijuana for friends, and perceived
the steel reinforcement behind
The self-reflexive culture,
the facism behind its borders
For us, no Paradise Alley, death!
We purgatoried our torsos night after night
With dreams, with drugs,
with waking nightmares,
Alcohol and cock and endless balls,
Incomparable blind;
streets if shuddering cloud and
Lightning in the mind
Leaping towards poles of London, and beyond,
Illuminating all the motionless world of
Time between
Pointless solidities of halls,
backyard grey life
Turpentine dawns, wine drunkenness
among the degraded vegetation
Peeping between the urban cracks like vomit
fresh from Saturday's carousing,
Storefront displays vandal-crashed
by joyride neon Neds in luminous Pumas
Blinking traffic light, sun and moon,
grey, featureless concrete
Simulated vibrations in the roaring winter,
compact disks
Of Brooklyn hip-hop ashcan rantings
kind verses
Perverted by the fact of isolation
on this island,
Who chained themselves to bus seats
for the endless commute
From one nameless suburb to another,
drained and weary, no longer high
Until the noise of wheels and children
brought them down shuddering,
Mouth-wracked,
Battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance
In the drear light of Monday morning,
and another shift
In the mine of information.
Who sank all night in the submarine light
of a million style bars
Pumped with soulless house music,
peopled with cocaine hairdressers
Floated out and sat through
the stale beer afternoon,
Despolate, to Fugazi born, but instead
listening to the crack of doom
On the hydrogen jukebox,
which only displays the manufactured
Inverse images and sounds
of faked perfection.
Lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
without the urge to speak
So dulled, that they cannot see the chains
ever being un-shackled
Un-coupled, and themselves let free to roam.
As though Ginsberg never happened,
and no sixties existed
Perhaps they never did,
Just a collective unconscious hippie dream
Or the reverse mysticism
of misty-eyed parents.
I have a dream where we wake up
electrified out of the coma
By our own souls' airplanes
roaring over the roof
They've come to drop angelic bombs
on the decomposing cities
The night illuminates itself,
imaginary walls collapse,
Oh, skinny legions run outside!
Shock of mercy, the eternal war is here
Oh victory forget your underwear, we're free,
Free to die as the promised nuclear flash
brings oblivion.
the stretching of inhibitions and wages.
In other dreams, a fish walks
dripping from the sea
Upright on un-evolved legs,
and with a glimpse of prescience
Sighting the sightless, deaf dumb,
shut-in existence of his descendants
He flops fish-like back into the liquid
And dares not trouble
to seek the shore again,
His legs diminishing back into protein
And empty seawater, only amoebic thoughts
of cell-bonding ever to occur.
And perhaps we would never become,
for want of ambition,
Slaves to our desires,
yet never bold enough
To take what we really want.
I salute my failed generation,
We are too timid to ever deserve freedom
Our masters know this: it keeps us cowed,
as some imagined apocalypse
Festers in our masturbatory musings.
We await death with breath baited,
always hungry never sated
Our howl is empty, merely sound,
an expression of agony
addressed to an unfeeling moon
That one day shall serve as a prison
for our children,
Moon-bound in lunar offices,
trapped in the six-seconds swing
Between cold-calls that link Monday through
Friday in a loop around the throat
Where screams die, anguish quenched by
pill-popping weekends chopped
Into white powder dawns that defy time with
the stretching of inhibitions and wages.
>>7857507
>unorganised
Yuck.
>>7860152
Genius.
>>7860152
I really could have used this in high school lit last year ;_;
