![]() ![]() The Fisher King myth, which helps to explain so much of the poem’s imagery and themes, is summed up by Pericles Lewis on Yale’s Modernisms site: the Fisher King) and various other religious and literary traditions. He probably borrowed this idea from James Joyce, who had used it in his novel Ulysses, which was published in book form in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land, but which had been appearing in instalments in the Little Review for several years prior to that.Įliot wrote an essay in praise of Joyce’s use of ancient myth, and borrowed this for his own poem – drawing on Arthurian legend (e.g. In addition to this, there is what is called the ‘mythic method’: Eliot’s use of a mythic narrative or structure. Eliot’s poem draws on a vast number of literary and religious texts and traditions. ![]() But Eliot’s poem took the techniques of modernism to new heights.Ī good place to start with an analysis of The Waste Land is to examine the importance of literary allusion. In 1919, a British female poet named Hope Mirrlees wrote a remarkable avant-garde poem, Paris: A Poem, which was published a year later by the Woolfs’ Hogarth press and anticipated Eliot’s poem in startling ways. ![]() ![]() Eliot’s wasn’t the first long modernist poem written about the War: an intriguing poem by Ford Madox Ford, ‘Antwerp’, had been written in 1915 and was a poem that Eliot himself admired. ![]()
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