Myth and Violence in The Waste Land Essay -- T.S. Eliot Waste Land Ess

As evidenced by his writings, T.S. Eliot has a profound appreciation for the use of invention as a point of dep wileure for maintaining a cultural or historical lieu. In The Waste Land, his employment of fabrication is not simply an allusive and metaphorical tactic, but rather an move at relating his own ideas and tropes to universals in order to establish some orthogonal order for the chaos he is presenting The element of myth in his art is not so much a creative method, a resumption of the role of mythic poet, as it is an intellectual strategy, a device for gaining perspective on himself and on his myth-forsaken time (Ellmann, 621). He draws from the ideas existing in the bodied unconsciousness (which compose myth) and the differences in his representations present his own ideas about the adult maleity condition. The fact that mythic structures are repeated cross-culturally evidences them as the outcome of primitive, greens thought. These structures include concepts of life and death cycles degeneration, death, and decay purgation, purification, and rebirth and groundwork and destruction. A common thread throughout the various mythic structures is that of violence. Violence is infallible for the completion of mythic carry throughes. A simple example of this idea is the truism that destruction (an intrinsically violent act) is a pre-requisite for creation. Furthermore, myth entails specific, violent acts against the human form as means for purgation and purification. On another level, creation is a violent exploit not only through its affinity to destruction, but also through its relationship to sexuality. The sex act, the animal process of creation, is an act of violence against the female for... ...t regenerate, and his very use of structured myth conveys through contrast Eliots concern with the utter chaos of modern life. whole kit and caboodle Cited Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Harcourt Brace & Company New York, 1 958. Ellmann, Richard The head start Waste Land. In Eliot in His Time Essays on the Occasion of the ordinal Anniversary of The Waste Land. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1973. Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough. Princeton University Press, 1973. work Consulted Eliot, T. S. Ulysses, Order, and Myth, from Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Frank Kermode, ed. London Faber and Faber, 1975. 177. Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr., ed. The Modern Tradition. New York Oxford University Press, 1965. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.