These are excellent critical essays. They show an impressive and sensitive close reading of the poem.
"As the city dissipates, we are transported to a more bucolic scene ..."
I don't know if any critics have speculated that Eliot in this poem was influenced by cinema, and perhaps 1922 was too early for such an influence to be felt. But this sort of transition, which seems to occur repeatedly in the poem, seems to me very like the cinema technique of the "dissolve." Alfred Hitchcock said that the art of cinema consists of putting together pieces of film to tell a story, and that The Waste Land is a poem that puts together pieces of verse to tell a story also makes it seem, to me at least, cinematic, though as I say it may not be a question of direct influence.
"... then what does he suggest is in store?" I think later Eliot gave a rather pessimistic answer to this question in Christianity and Culture: "we can even anticipate a period when it will be possible to say that [society] will have no culture". I remember first reading that long ago and thinking that he surely must be overstating the case, but more recently I feel be may have been right.
Anyway, Eliot later claimed that the poem was a completely personal "grouse against life." But what did he know, he only wrote the thing.
Nice analysis. I would add that the poem is also a study in the pains of excessive self-consciousness and indecision, something Eliot felt acutely on a personal and generational level (the kind of spirit that led to the "Do I dare?" refrain in another of his works). To that end, the use of Purgatorio is particularly interesting - it is an indeterminate place, where people are not yet fully one thing nor the other.
In Canto 18, exactly at the midpoint of the Mountain of Purgatory, Dante is at the terrace of the slothful. Mostly he's trying to learn how to love correctly, and temper the emotions with a spirit of divine love guided by reason, but the slothful (who in a sense could not be bothered to be one thing nor another) run past him without stopping, so all he hears are fragments of what they are saying - a form paralleled in much of The Waste Land, which is full of fragmentary voices.
One could equally argue that the form is a literary attempt to convey the fragmented media world of the city (imagine what taking a trolley past advertisements while the radio played seemed like when it was new) that also influenced cubism and the experimental tone poems of the time. Jon Corelis mentions the effect of cinema on literature, which is similar - On the third page of The Great Gatsby, published just three years after this, Fitzgerald likens his emotional state to a flower opening up in sped-up film.
I like the Purgatory thing, though.
Also of note: What kind of barely known poet publishes notes to his poem, attempting to recapitulate what they say as most of world culture? He and Pound were so very apocalyptic.
These are excellent critical essays. They show an impressive and sensitive close reading of the poem.
"As the city dissipates, we are transported to a more bucolic scene ..."
I don't know if any critics have speculated that Eliot in this poem was influenced by cinema, and perhaps 1922 was too early for such an influence to be felt. But this sort of transition, which seems to occur repeatedly in the poem, seems to me very like the cinema technique of the "dissolve." Alfred Hitchcock said that the art of cinema consists of putting together pieces of film to tell a story, and that The Waste Land is a poem that puts together pieces of verse to tell a story also makes it seem, to me at least, cinematic, though as I say it may not be a question of direct influence.
"... then what does he suggest is in store?" I think later Eliot gave a rather pessimistic answer to this question in Christianity and Culture: "we can even anticipate a period when it will be possible to say that [society] will have no culture". I remember first reading that long ago and thinking that he surely must be overstating the case, but more recently I feel be may have been right.
Anyway, Eliot later claimed that the poem was a completely personal "grouse against life." But what did he know, he only wrote the thing.
Nice analysis. I would add that the poem is also a study in the pains of excessive self-consciousness and indecision, something Eliot felt acutely on a personal and generational level (the kind of spirit that led to the "Do I dare?" refrain in another of his works). To that end, the use of Purgatorio is particularly interesting - it is an indeterminate place, where people are not yet fully one thing nor the other.
In Canto 18, exactly at the midpoint of the Mountain of Purgatory, Dante is at the terrace of the slothful. Mostly he's trying to learn how to love correctly, and temper the emotions with a spirit of divine love guided by reason, but the slothful (who in a sense could not be bothered to be one thing nor another) run past him without stopping, so all he hears are fragments of what they are saying - a form paralleled in much of The Waste Land, which is full of fragmentary voices.
One could equally argue that the form is a literary attempt to convey the fragmented media world of the city (imagine what taking a trolley past advertisements while the radio played seemed like when it was new) that also influenced cubism and the experimental tone poems of the time. Jon Corelis mentions the effect of cinema on literature, which is similar - On the third page of The Great Gatsby, published just three years after this, Fitzgerald likens his emotional state to a flower opening up in sped-up film.
I like the Purgatory thing, though.
Also of note: What kind of barely known poet publishes notes to his poem, attempting to recapitulate what they say as most of world culture? He and Pound were so very apocalyptic.