eliot and picasso Essay

How is Eliot a man of his time? Place The Wasteland in its historical/cultural/intellectual context, by comparing his worldview with one of these other influential figures from his period.

The twentieth century was a period of dramatic change due to World War I, modern technology, and many new thinkers and philosophy. After the horror of war and the vulgarity of the world that emerged they began to lose the true values of life, such as friendship, love, and trust. Many influential artists of that era vividly illustrate the absence of trust and their belief in the rapidly decaying spiritual and moral values in the twentieth century through their works.
Eliot’s The Wasteland portrays the dismal and barren civilization in Europe of the twentieth century. After the World War I, so many had suffered both mental and physical shocks from the practically meaningless warfare. At that time, the world seemed to them \ a fruitless and meaningless place, where even the possession of ideals seemed like folly. The first section of the Wasteland, “The Burial of the Dead”, creates an image of the tremendous slaughter of the First World War and a death of human beings through “With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. / There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!” In addition, an absence of true love is portrayed in the second section, “A Game of Chess”, by showing two sides of modern sexuality; one side is dry, sterile and another is rampant and loveless. The Wasteland takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the First World War had ravaged Europe.
On the other hand, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a symbol of revolution against the conventions of the Renaissance and Impressionism. In this work, Picasso puts effort into visual perspectives and the meaning of objects, deeper than their mere physical structure. He paints a picture of five nude prostitutes, one sitting and four standing. All...