T. S. Eliot described the use of myth in modern literary works as a way of controlling, of ordering. Do the mythical and classical references in The Waste Land help to give it order and shape, or make it more fragmentary and disordered?
Transfer-Encoding: chunked T. S. Eliot described the use of myth in modern literary works as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering’. Do the mythical and classical references in The Waste Land help to give it order and shape, or make it more fragmentary and disordered? “A collage of materials”[1]. This brief description of Eliot’s Wasteland by Kroll captures well the fragmentary nature of Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, although this essay will argue that whilst the poem has a highly-disordered structure, the use of such extensive mythical and classical references do give some order to Eliot’s work – in terms of the message it is trying to portray. In the aftermath of World War One, many including Eliot became disillusioned with the ‘modern’ culture and ‘progress’ that was being made by European society… as it was progress that had led to the deaths of millions. The various mythical and classical allusions made by Eliot in the Wasteland – and there are several – allow the poem to act as a sophisticated metaphor of why Eliot believes that Europe should return to its cultural traditions and a time when people were united, rather than continue to place materialism and superficiality above everything else, as this is what arguably led to the political arguments which caused the World War in the first place. One example of literal fragmentation in
An Analysis of "The Heart of Woman" by W.B. Yeats
An Analysis of �The Heart of the Woman� by W.B. Yeats O what to me the little room / That was brimmed up with prayer and rest; / He bade me out into the gloom, / And my breast lies upon his breast. ��������The line �O what to me the little room� could possibly allude to the woman�s heart and how it accepts love inwardly in order to fill the spaces of her �room.� Similar to how a room is filled, one can interpret that love can also abstractly fill the �little room.� Also, the line �That was brimmed up with prayer and rest� could express her passiveness when receiving love, similar to how prayers and rest are passive. In prayer, one expects a deity to impart everything without relying on any work while rest excludes a person from exerting any effort. So it can be inferred that in the first two lines of the poem, the woman is still na�ve about the experiences of love and lacks the sense of maturity for her to understand what love is. The third line �He bade me out into the gloom,� in a sense can mean that there is an attempt to accomplish something. Literally bid means to make a proposal and in the context of the poem, �bade a person out into the gloom� can mean that there is an effort to complete a certain