European Society
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224822

The waste land

F. B. Pinion

pp. 119-139

Abstract

Eliot's allusiveness through imagery and quotation in The Waste Land is exceptional in degree; it can call up literary scenes and overtones of thought and feeling, all in all equivalent to an epic, as I. A. Richards said, of far greater import to the modern world than Paradise Lost, and comparable rather to Joyce's Ulysses. This kind of imaginative concentration is not original; it will be found in novels and poems by other writers, but never in all probability at the same sustained intensity. What is peculiar to The Waste Land is the collocation of images and scenes in a manner calculated to evoke feelings and accordant ideas, without overt statements of meaning. There is no contextual narrative or thought, as in a poem by Baudelaire, to give more explicit significance to the imagery. Coherence depends on imaginative interlinking and unification, Eliot's "logic of the imagination".

Publication details

Published in:

Pinion F. B. (1986) A T. S. Eliot companion: life and works. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pages: 119-139


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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-07449-5_12

Full citation:

Pinion F. B. (1986) The waste land, In: A T. S. Eliot companion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 119–139.