Eliot After 'The Waste Land' Book Review

This review of Robert Crawford's Eliot After 'The Waste Land' focuses on the poem as a lyric poem and its use of mythic narrative. In addition to analyzing the poem as a lyric poem, it also discusses how the poem works as a song lyric poem.

Robert Crawford's Eliot After 'The Waste Land'

Eliot, a revolutionary modernist poet and visionary, had a troubled life. Crawford's Young Eliot explores the complexities of his life, revealing his inner turmoil. He writes with insight and wit. Despite his troubled past, he continued to write poetry in his later years.

The first volume of Crawford's Eliot biography traced Eliot's life and career up to his publication of the revolutionary poem, The Waste Land. The second volume picks up the story after the poet converted to Catholicism and married Valerie Fletcher. Crawford reveals the emotional turmoil Eliot went through during his early 20s and shows how these experiences influenced the poet's later work.

Crawford reveals new material about Eliot, including secret love letters to an unknown woman. The book also illuminates the poet's long second act as a miserable man trapped in a disastrous marriage. Eliot was disgusted with modernity's cultural disintegration, and he clung to right-wing politics and the Christian faith to find stability.

Crawford does not shy away from the darker aspects of Eliot's psyche, revealing the author's feelings about the Marx Brothers and the Holocaust. As a result, the book provides fresh evidence of Eliot's antisemitism. The Marx Brothers are portrayed as "low-class Jews" in Eliot's works. Eliot also asks why so many Jews are diabolic.

Eliot's poem as a song lyric poem

T.S. Eliot's poem as a song lyric poem is a classic example of how a poem can be turned into a song. While he wouldn't approve of the style of contemporary pop music, he remains the lyric poet of choice for ambitious songwriters. Many of his famous phrases have been used in modern songs.

Although Eliot exposes the transience of love in this poem, it does offer a message of hope. While it is true that love doesn't last forever, he encourages the reader to look beyond their pain and move on with their lives. In this way, the poem is both a hopeful and sobering indictment of modern society.

The poem begins with a thought-provoking statement that questions the existence of space and time. Eliot uses imagery in the first four lines to suggest that space and time are too complex to be real. This question is not so easily answered, and we will need to look at the poem's underlying themes to determine whether it can be interpreted as a song lyric poem.

Eliot's poem also displays the impact of his lifelong pursuit of philosophy and religion. His mother spent most of her time writing religious verse, and she also taught at Antioch College. In fact, she had aspirations to become a serious writer, and even published a few poems in the Christian Register. Eliot's mother was a major influence in his life. He rejected his mother's bloodless Episcopal outlook and instead chose a medieval Catholic outlook.

Eliot's use of mythic narrative

The mythic narrative of "The Waste Land" is an important technique that Eliot uses to create a broader context for the poem. In it, the poet weaves centuries of magical sights into a single story, and he does it by letting readers know that he is doing so. By doing so, he invites readers to share in the quest for meaning that this poem presents. After all, the poem is about a stormy sea of signifiers, and about a cultural drought.

Eliot's use of mythic storytelling in The Waste Land is particularly fascinating. His use of the Grail legend is deeply linked to the myth of the Holy Grail. It is based on a story about a king who made his land a barren place for the famine and hunger that followed the death of the king. Eliot makes this story a warning for contemporary readers. In the end, it is up to the reader to decide whether to believe the myth or not.

The use of mythic narrative in The Waste Land plays with myth and reality. Its characters and themes reflect the emptiness and despair of war and the aftermath of it. It also plays with the reader's own consciousness. Throughout the novel, the reader is caught between the world of the present and the past, winter and memory, and past and future.