Women in the Landscape of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland

Abstract

TS Eliot’s poem The Wasteland is considered as one of the most remarkable achievements of Modernist poetry. The Wasteland portrays the moral, spiritual and psychological disintegration and fragmentation of the society after the first world war. The Wasteland that the poet describes in the poem is not the geographical Wasteland but the “emotional and spiritual sterility” of modern man. Eliot compares the 20^th c forms of belief and disbelief with those of the past to show the moral, spiritual and psychological “loss” to the modern world. The poet successfully uses the literary technique of ‘irony’ to drive home the idea of the “loss” to the readers. ‘Irony,’ is a figure of speech in which we find a ‘gap’ between what is said and what is implied.