T.S. Eliot

Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” is unlike most of the other modernist works that we have read because He doesn’t have a lot of technology discussions. I mean he does write this poem in a new form but it reads fragmented and impersonal because it is hard to understand what he is trying to talk about with all of the fragments and references to religious stories and Shakespeare.

In High school I remember having to read The Screwtape Letters and I remember it being from the perspective of Uncle Screwtape who ended up being Satan. So in this story I’m at least aware of Eliot’s passion for religious writing. Each of the sections reads like a different story. The fourth story is the shortest and by far the simplest and easiest to read, it basically talks about Phlebas who drowns and decays in a whirlpool, it talks about his identity and how he was once hadsome and as tall as the reader.

Eliot seems to really embrace the modernist movement in what he talks about and how he forms his stanzas all fragmented, but he speaks in so much reference and footnotes that it is hard to follow the points that he is trying to get across. He doesn't make it obvious that he is trying to talk about the decay and/or change of religion.