Dear Sbaprasad,

let us take the title you refer to: Waste land. You can understand the complexity of Eliot's symbols, if you consider that this term might refer to the season winter, to a loss of fertlity, in a natural sense of the word as well as in a spiritual sense, to the myth of the Fisherking, cultural decline, war, etc. Eliot does not want to make it easy for the reader to make sense of his poeticimages. COnsider also how much he liked baroque poetry, like that of John Donne.

Best,

Ferenc

Dear Sbaprasad,

together with all the semantic levels mentioned by Ferenc, I'd suppose a good sound study in Tarot and relied occult symbolisms. T.S. Eliot himself wrote in his comment to the poem that it was all but a matter of serious interest for him - but in any way the comment itself was a part of a game with readers' expectations.

If you by some chance read Russian, see:

https://www.academia.edu/15162119/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BA_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C_%D0%94%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%83_%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%BC._%D0%98%D0%B7_%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B8_%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D1%81%D1%8E%D0%B6%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B0_%D0%B2_%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5

Dear Vadim Mikhaiin, 

I wish you were a bit clearer in your exposition. Would you mention Tarot's work which you have advised me read?

Sibaprasad

Email:[email protected]

Вадим Михайлин. Как стать Дураку Повешенным. Из истории одного таротного сюжета в европейском искусстве  // Волга, 1992, № 7-8. С. 127-134

Dear Vadim, 

I cannot understand Russian. Please write in English.

Professor Sibaprasad Dutta PhD

Email: [email protected]

Dear Vadim, 

I cannot understand Russian. Please write in English.

Professor Sibaprasad Dutta PhD

Email: [email protected]

The Waste Land is a modern poetry of symbols. Nature, Mythology, sounds and science everything has a subtle meaning to show the hollowness of modern life.

http://vipinbeharigoyal.blogspot.in/2015/11/dilemma-of-modern-man-expounded-by.html

Dear Professor Goyal,

First all, I would like to edit your post.

The Waste Land is a modern poem of symbols. Nature, Mythology, Sounds and Science - everything has a subtle meaning to show the hollowness of modern life.

*************************************************************************************************

I wish you posted a discussion in detail. Yours is too brief. Anyway, to make our friendship stronger, you may kindly be in touch with me via email. That would enable us to exchange thoughts and views.

All the best,

Professor Sibaprasad Dutta M.A. (English), ACIB (London), PhD

395 Ramakrishna Palli: Sonarpur: Kolkata 700150

Email: [email protected]

T S Eliot is an very interesting poet, because he wants the reader to ready his thoughts thoroughly and get him what type of a poet he is? so one cannot easily judge him, needs to be very close to his thoughts, then only  one can understand him.

Dear Rajani,

This is good sermon which ought not to have been repeated. In order to understand T.S. Eliot I have studied for two long years and have presented several papers. But I posted my question in order to elicit information from co-researchers who study the issue from different perspectives.

Prof. Sibaprasad Dutta PhD

Well, Eliot himself is speaking of the "implicit symbolism" of his poem in the final footnotes, with reference to Weston, From Ritual and Romance, and James Frazer.

Notwithstanding that mention his poetical technique was based not on symbolism, but on objective correlatives. The association made with John Donne by Hoercher is rather correct. Indeed Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, is classifying both the objective correlative of Eliot, and the "deceit" of Donne under the rubric of "non-allegorical" images.

Then, if this holds true, we should think of symbols in Eliot in a different way that symbols are normally understood and appraised.

Besides it is clear to me that the fact of adding footnotes to a Poem is a way of producing its meaning through deferment. We can not understand the Waste Land if we do not read Weston and Frazer. But we cannot understand Weston if we don't read the Parzival....and so on and so on....into a "wilderness of mirrors".

By the way, it is intriguing to note that in Apocalypse Now, Coppola, before introducing Kurtz, is picturing with the camera two books in his grove: Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Frazer's The Golden Bough! And we know that Waste Land had to be dedicated to Kurtz (!) and it was Ezra Pound to compel Eliot to change the epigraphy of the poem.

So Coppola is deferring the meaning of his movie toward Eliot, and Eliot is deferring it toward Conrad, Weston and Frazer and so many others.

So what we have, from Prufrock to the Four Quartets, via the Waste Land, is a way of producing meaning through objective correlatives and deferment.

Is this a "use of Symbols"?

I think it is not; it is something different.

An explanation can maybe be found at a theological level, for so important it was this level for Eliot.

In a way Symbols are Protestant. Bread and Blood are just Symbols of the Passion of Jesus; they are not the signs of His actual and real presence in the celebration.

Under a different, and more catholic viewpoint, bread and blood could be said to be the objective correlatives of the Holy Presence of Christ, not a mere Symbol of it.

And are these objects which defer the actual gestures of participants to another level and story, as the Gospels, which are producing their own meaning constantly by deferment to the Old Testament, and so on.

My conclusion is then that we should appreciate Eliot not from the standpoint of symbolism, but as a peculiar kind of modernism, rooted in the Tuscans as Dante and Gunizelli, and in the Elizabethans, and in the Metaphysical Poets as John Donne.

He tries to produce a newer production of meaning, which is essentially based on pre-romantic techniques, and which is theologically meaningful as anti-protestant.

Dear Professor Pier Monateri,

Your post is the product of deep thought, but I am sorry to say that it is clumsily written. There emerges no specific point of view nor are your views clear. It is apparent that you have studied a lot, but your post is not coherently drafted. 

I wish to hear from you via email. 

Best,

Professor Sibaprasad Dutta M.A. (English), ACIB (London), PhD

Email:[email protected]

Eliot’s symbol of perpetual life appears first in the epigraph as the ancient Sybil who cannot die, and again, perhaps, in “The Burial of the Dead” as “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks” (“She is older than the rocks among which she sits ...” runs Pater’s description). She is the woman in “The Game of Chess,” surrounded by “her strange synthetic perfumes” and on whose dressing-room walls hang the “withered stumps of time”—the artistic record of the mythical past (“... and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands”). And she appears, finally, in “The Fire Sermon,” where she draws “her long black hair out tight,” while bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall (“... like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave”).

-- Thank you

Dear Simhachalam,

Your post is beautiful. It suggests that you have read the poem scrutinously and assimilated the thoughts filling the poem. The Waste Land (1922) heralded the emergence of a new era not only in English literature but also in the world literature. Without a proper grasp of the mindset of T.S. Eliot, we cannot make much progress in the study of post-Eliot English poetry.

I hope and pray that you will earn your PhD soon.

Sincerely,

Prof. Sibaprasad Dutta

@ Dutta : Try T.S. Eliot and Jung

Peter,

Your answer is too cryptic. I  seek an elaborate post.

Sibaprasad

Peter,

Your answer is too cryptic. I  seek an elaborate post.

Sibaprasad

Yes, I'm trying to sketch it out more clearly.

Sorry fo delay.

First of all, I really wish to thank Simhachalam Thamarana for his absolutely thoughtful insight into the symbol of the Sybil throughout the poem.

My question was, anyhow, not about the Sybil herself, but on why Eliot thought that the passage from Petronius could be a substitute for the quotation from Conrad.

If "Horror, Horror" was the best way to resume the meaning of the poem, how "Nam Sybillam quidem...." can take its place?

Besides as a Symbol of eternal life that of the Sybilla is rather puzzling. She is condemned to live eternally and desiring to die..."Apothanein thelo"....because she is growing older and older, and smaller and smaller, without the possibility of dying. Is this entrapment in a threshold between life and death which is a horror? But certainly, in Conrad, there is nothing similar. We are not told what is haunting Kurtz in his last moment of "perfect knowledge". His horrors remain faceless in the novel. Can they be related to the Sybil? I presume only by some "contrived corridor" which was apparent only to Eliot.

I owe an answer to Sibaprasad Dutta.

I thank him so much for his kind remark and compliment.

"Your post is the product of deep thought, but I am sorry to say that it is clumsily written. There emerges no specific point of view nor are your views clear. It is apparent that you have studied a lot, but your post is not coherently drafted. "

I had to think a lot about it. 

For what concerns my clumsiness I hope you can remind that English is not my mother tongue. I am half Italian, and half Swiss-German (von Thurgau), and teaching in France.

So I am sorry but I try to state my thoughts in English as I can.

The most intriguing part of your remark is that concerning the "clarté".

Certainly I have not clear views on the matter, and this is why I raised a question!

And this is also explaining why it does not still emerge a specific point of view. I haven't. But I am not selling a book proposal to a publisher, simply asking questions to colleagues!

Secondly, don't you think that what is clear and what is unclear is culturally bound?

I mean: when I gave an answer to previous remarks, Wolfgang, for instance, grasped my point quite immediately. 

I am using to lecture to a French and mixed audience, and many times what is perfectly clear for the French it is not so for the others, and vice-versa.

In legal matters, e.g., every work in French must be divided into 2 parts, and each part must be subdivided into 2 small parts, in order to have a plan composed in the following way: I, a, b; II, a, b. If something it is not put into this form it is perceived as confused.

In US nobody would accept this as a properly done term-paper, which must be divided into 5 parts: Introduction, case 1, case 2, case 3, Conclusion.

A French author is not expected to reveal at the very beginning what his theory is. An American paper is invariably expected to begin with the phrase: "the aim of this paper is...". Besides Americans are constantly repeating ..."In the previous section we have seen that....In this paragraph now we shall see that...." These repetitions would be deemed to be unbearable in French, and should be strictly avoided, but an American reader seems to get lost without them.

What, now, I can try to do is to reframe my thoughts in a "clear" US template in 5 paragraphs, but you must concede me a bit of time.

My interests are in Law and Literature. This means that they can concern both Law as Literature (the way the legal discourse is framed after literary templates) or Law in Literature (the way in which highly complex and technical theories on law and the state, or sovereignty and legitimacy can find expression in literary texts). And it is under this perspective that I was conducting a "hermeneutical interrogation" on the Eliot's text of the Waste Land.

I learned a lot during this discussion, and I am really indebted to your contribution.

I owe an answer to Sibaprasad Dutta.

I thank him so much for his kind remark and compliment.

"Your post is the product of deep thought, but I am sorry to say that it is clumsily written. There emerges no specific point of view nor are your views clear. It is apparent that you have studied a lot, but your post is not coherently drafted. "

I had to think a lot about it. 

For what concerns my clumsiness I hope you can remind that English is not my mother tongue. I am half Italian, and half Swiss-German (von Thurgau), and teaching in France.

So I am sorry but I try to state my thoughts in English as I can.

The most intriguing part of your remark is that concerning the "clarté".

Certainly I have not clear views on the matter, and this is why I raised a question!

And this is also explaining why it does not still emerge a specific point of view. I haven't. But I am not selling a book proposal to a publisher, simply asking questions to colleagues!

Secondly, don't you think that what is clear and what is unclear is culturally bound?

I mean: when I gave an answer to previous remarks, Wolfgang, for instance, grasped my point quite immediately. 

I am using to lecture to a French and mixed audience, and many times what is perfectly clear for the French it is not so for the others, and vice-versa.

In legal matters, e.g., every work in French must be divided into 2 parts, and each part must be subdivided into 2 small parts, in order to have a plan composed in the following way: I, a, b; II, a, b. If something it is not put into this form it is perceived as confused.

In US nobody would accept this as a properly done term-paper, which must be divided into 5 parts: Introduction, case 1, case 2, case 3, Conclusion.

A French author is not expected to reveal at the very beginning what his theory is. An American paper is invariably expected to begin with the phrase: "the aim of this paper is...". Besides Americans are constantly repeating ..."In the previous section we have seen that....In this paragraph now we shall see that...." These repetitions would be deemed to be unbearable in French, and should be strictly avoided, but an American reader seems to get lost without them.

What, now, I can try to do is to reframe my thoughts in a "clear" US template in 5 paragraphs, but you must concede me a bit of time.

My interests are in Law and Literature. This means that they can concern both Law as Literature (the way the legal discourse is framed after literary templates) or Law in Literature (the way in which highly complex and technical theories on law and the state, or sovereignty and legitimacy can find expression in literary texts). And it is under this perspective that I was conducting a "hermeneutical interrogation" on the Eliot's text of the Waste Land.

I learned a lot during this discussion, and I am really indebted to your contribution.

Dear Mr. Monateri & Mr. Schwarz,

I understand why your post was not intelligible to me. I am not also an English-speaking man. I am an Indian, but India is vast country where each province has a different language. Prominent among them are Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Rajasthani and Gujarati. Hindi is the mother tongue of about 550 million people, Bengali of 220 million (including the people of Bangladesh), and each of the rest is spoken by 100 million people. The total population of India is 12500 million. My mother tongue is Bengali - the language in which Rabindranath Tagore wrote all forms of literature. Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for his anthology - Gitanjali ( The Song Offerings). The book contained English translations of about 60 poems originally written in Bengali but the poems were translated into English by Tagore with the assistance of W.B. Yeats. I studied English as the second language in school, but I majored in English and also did M.A. in English Language & Literature. 

Anyway, I try to be as clear as possible when I write, and I have three publications all written in English but published from the USA.

This is all for the time being. Thanks and Regards.

Sibaprasad

T. S. Eliot uses nature imagery as a symbol of human life. The Waste Land is full of imagery which enfolds the human condition and psychology. Through such symbols he enlightens the life philosophy.

Hello Padmavati, 

I expect a detailed submission from you.

Thanks,

Sibaprasad

Dear Sibaprasad,

  Thank you for asking this question. Eliot is actually my favourite poet. As far as tarot goes -- I can read it -- it is not necessary to understand the poem. The cards that Eliot uses are something of a departure. To quote his notes at the end of the poem: "I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience." Now, let us address your question: the entire poem is riddled with symbols, and how do we begin to understand this strange language -- Even the names of the movements stem from symbolism. For example, "The Burial of the Dead" is a reference to The Church of England's burial service. I would love to talk more about this poem with you, but first, are there any symbols in particular that you seek information about?

Water, Symbols of Birth, Death and Resurrection

Water, a predominant symbol of birth, death and resurrection, appears throughout the poem. As in the opening, water signifies the giver of life, a symbol of fertility. Yet it also stands for death: “Fear death by water,” or “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” a literary allusion to a character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" who had been drowned so long under water that his eyes have turned into “pearls.”

The symbolic meaning of water as an emblem of death climaxes in the section “Death by Water,” which deals with a deceased Phoenician. “A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers," Eliot writes. "As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool.”

Yet in “What the Thunder Said,” water symbolizes the hope -- the resurrection of the desolate wasteland: “Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves / Waited for rain, while the black clouds gathered far distant, over Himavant.”

Drought as Symbol of Death

Although the poem deals with war's physical and emotional effects, the speaker of the poem uses drought as a symbol of death: "Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / [...] There is not even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without rain [...]" Throughout these and others, drought is the symbol of death. To heighten the anxiety of waiting for rain, the speaker says that even the thunder, which indicates the possibility of rain, is “sterile,” thus killing what hope of rain there is in this stricken landscape.

Symbols of Disconnect between Human and Natural Worlds

In the section “A Game of Chess,” the speaker of the poem derides the how modern world has lost touch with nature. The organic life-giving nature has turned into inorganic lifeless objects: “The Chair, she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble, where the glass / Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines [...]” Fruited vines belong to nature, and not to an artificial object like chair, for example. The characters in the poem have isolated themselves into an artificial world “drowned in synthetic perfumes.” Such mismatch between what is natural and what is artificial pokes fun at the sense of personal disconnect in “The Waste Land,” one of the poem's recurring themes.