Saturday, February 23, 2019
Reminded me of the Waste Land
Yesterday I was visiting Auburn University's campus. While I was there, I also had an interview with some lady from the honors college. She was super nice, but she talked sooooo fast! It was so hard to keep up with what she was saying, and she would not stop, so I had no time to ask her any questions about things that made no sense. My brain at one point was so focused on her speaking to try and understand every word she was saying, my mind eventually just stopped working for like 5 seconds. Literally! My hearing shut off completely. My vision became blurry, I felt like I was floating in the air, and my eyes felt like they rolled in a 360 degree motion. It looked like I was upside down at one point. It was the trippiest experience ever. I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was about to seize or pass out or something. After my brain lapse was over, my body returned back to normal, but I was not following the lady at all. This little experience reminded me of the writing style of the Waste Land. The poem is fragmented and really hard to follow. If you don't pay attention, you'll miss the point of the poem. But if you focus to much on it, you may explode your brain like I seemed to do.
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5 comments:
Wow! That sounds exhausting and totally disorienting. I think your experience and your comparison of it to The Waste Land really highlights what T.S. Eliot was trying to do with this complicated, famous poem. As you mentioned, T.S. Eliot's poem includes much fragmentation and discontinuity--intentionally. Although literary works like this one can often be difficult to sift through, I think that further illustrates how many people felt during the modernist period. The world was suffering from the effects of World War I, which resulted in death, destruction, and disillusionment (just to name a few things). In addition, nothing about life was constant. Rapid technological advancement was occurring, and scientific, philosophical, and religious institutions were been undermined. Imagine living in this ever-changing world! I bet your head would be spinning just like Ben's.
Regardless of our individual feelings about The Waste Land, I think we have to admit that T.S. Eliot's poem expertly captures the emotions of a vast majority of people during the early 1900s. I think the more we try to understand Eliot's motivations, the more we can appreciate his artistic vision.
@unkown^, who are you? (You should put your name so Mrs. King can give you credit)
MR. BONE, I am sick and tired of you hyperbolizing your blog posts. The other week you claimed I killed a lizard, now you’re going to pull this? There’s no way you actually felt like you were floating. Poor authorship and downright dishonesty!
I do agree with you, however, that Eliot writing is way too fast! The overall style of the piece reminds me of those annoying people who purposely try to talk fancy to make them sound smart. Much of The Waste Land is just Eliot inserting allusion after allusion, language after language, and metaphor after metaphor SUPPOSEDLY in an attempt to make great literature. To me, it’s all over the top, and it comes off as Eliot trying to flaunt his intelligence.
The style of The Waste Land actually reminds me a lot of James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist of a Young Man. While the proper term for Joyce’s work is stream of consciousness, the style is, nevertheless, rapidly paced and overly crafted. However, The Waste Land is not as blatant as Joyce’s piece, and I must say that I enjoy it much more. The content, although not always initially clear to me, is intriguing after taking the time to decipher it.
As I was also on this tour with Mr. Bone, I can attest to the fact that the lady giving the tour talked wayyyyyy too fast. It was most definitely a difficult experience following along with the already densely packed information she was providing with us, and was reminiscent of The Waste Land. However, I do think this was most likely hyperbolized as far as the “trippy” experience you gained from that day. I think if you were on the verge of passing out I would have noticed.. OR.. maybe that’s all up to interpretation jusssttt liikkeeee The Waste Land kind of is. ;)
I’m gonna have to agree with Bennett on this one. Ben, there is no way that your eyes seemed to roll in a 360 motion, your vision became blurry, and you felt like you were floating. Worst case is that you just became VERY confused.
All jokes aside, I do agree with you here about the way that T.S. Eliot wrote this particular poem. Upon my first read through of this poem, I was so lost that I re-read entire stanzas over and over and it still made no sense to me. The footnotes didn’t really help either. Footnotes are supposed to help the audience/readers understand the poem a little more considering that there are SO MANY allusions. However, as I read the footnotes, I still found myself thoroughly confused. The poem just jumps around wayyyy too much. Definitely one of hardest things I’ve had to read in terms of understanding. Heck! This makes Hamlet look like an easy to read children’s book! Now THAT’S saying something. At least when I read Hamlet I could get the gist of what was happening even when I was lost. But this, oh no. I definitely need some help with interpreting this one haha.
Hey! UNKNOWN IS ME (Jessie). Thanks, Bennett! I’m not sure what’s going on with my google account.
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