“The Wasteland” by T.S. Elliot is a brilliantly complex and hard to interpret poem. Dealing with the after-effects of World War 1, it explores how poetry and modernism should respond to such devastation as a global war. The picture painted by Elliot is bleak and full of desolation, it’s a world that Elliot seems uncertain will recover, but in one section of the poem on death that is a glimmer of the notion of hope. A character of the poem says, “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? /‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed’” (ll. 71-73). Continue reading “Poetry’s Response to Modernism and War: The Wasteland by T.S. Elliot” →