The WASTE Land My son Abhishek s Senior Cambridge A Level Exam is just round the corner. Yet when I entered his room I found among other books a copy of T S Eliots Waste Land. This reminds me of ..... You’re in bed and you’re hearing your parents talk. You’re just hearing the lovely lilt of it. It’s this beautiful music, and you want to be a part of it, and it doesn’t matter that you don’t understand. And that mystery of not knowing what they’re saying is a wonderful mystery. And you’ll never know what they’re saying. Even if you knew the words, you still wouldn’t know what they were saying. I remember that, I remember listening to just the sounds of language and thinking it was so beautiful, or more the intonations, the ups and downs. The contours. Which has an interesting connection with T.S. Eliot, when he said, about The Wasteland, that it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the languages that are in it, you just let it wash over you. That’s an interesting bumping up against that childhood experience, overhearing just the contours. How comforting it is. ~Dorianne Laux Mattress Talk _______________________________________ The Waste Land is a long poem written by T.S. Eliot. It is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central text in Modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem is considered by most difficult to understand. Among its famous phrases is the Sanskrit Sloka Shantih Shantih Shantih, April is the cruellest monthand I will show you fear in a handful of dust.Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon and from Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. Because of this, critics and scholars regard the poem as obscure.The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. _________________________________ Thomas Stearns Eliot was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and one of the twentieth centurys major poets.Born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri in the United States, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 at the age of 25.Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem which is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement.For many years Eliot had suffered from lung-related health problems including bronchitis and tachycardia caused by heavy smoking. He died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965. ______________________________________ Dorianne Laux ,born January 10, 1952 Augusta, Maine,is an American poet.Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988.Laux taught at the University of Oregon. She is a professor at North Carolina State University’s creative writing program, and the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. She is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. __________________________________________ Image : Two Hard Cover Edition of T S Eliots Waste Land. The open page is from T.S. Eliot:The Waste Land. Richmond: L. & V. Woolf, 1923. _______________________________________________ Tags : #WasteLand #TSEliot #DorianneLaux #AlokeKumar #AKThisandThat
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 03:48:42 +0000
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