T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land - Essay Example Attractive to current readers insofar as it resists coherence, the poem has lately been interpreted as a critique of literary and sexual proprieties. It lacks "respect for tradition, " is fascinated with "mutation, degradation, and fragmentation, " split between a longing for "'improper' sexual desires" and a wish to be "rid" of them. (Charles W. Pollard, 2003, pp 90-110). In a curious twist of literary history, recent critics of The Waste Land have returned to the questions that concerned its initial readers, before its elevation to the status of a classic. Troubled by its disorderliness and its debasement of literary value, Eliot inserts beautiful quotations into ugly contexts, and that his poem is a considerable affront against aesthetic sensibilities. Trying to recapture this sense of The Waste Land's offensiveness, critics at the end of the century stress its chaotic structure, its multiple voices, and its internal conflicts, which render it an unfinalized, open text. In so doing, however, they continue to beat a dead horse.