Fragmentation of poetry.

T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a foundational text of modernism, representing the moment at which imagism moves into modernism proper. Broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices of imagery come together to form a disjunctive anti-narrative. The motif of sight and vision is as central to the poem as it is to modernism; the omni-present character Tiresias acting as a unifying theme. The reader is thrown into confusion, unable to see anything but a heap of broken images. The narrator, however (in "The Waste Land" as in other texts), promises to show the reader a different meaning; that is, how to make meaning from dislocation and fragmentation. This construction of an exclusive meaning is essential to modernism.

If you would like to hear an audio discussion about the poem, go here...
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hlb38 f


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