Myths in Wasteland

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Abstract— Eliot has clarified the concept of mythical method in his review of James Joyce's 'Ulyses'. He writes:' In using myth,in manipulating a futility and anarchy which is contemporary history...continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,Mr.Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him...It is simply a way of controlling,of ordering,of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history....Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.'Eliot has adopted the technique of compression and telescoping and with a poetic shorthand. He links the predicament of modern humanity with that of other ages of human history, turning the contemporary malaise into an eternal problem of man.thus the past and the present merge together and antiquity is brought into the embrace of contemporaneity, so that a poem of four hundred thirty lines acquires a disillusionment in the cultural history of the entire human nation. Keywords— Myth, Eliot,The Waste Land,Disillusionment,Futility,Anarchy. I. INTRODUCTION In his essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”,Eliot observes : “The great poet in writing himself writes his time ”. The dictum is a fair statement of his own position in relation to the poetry of his age.But it will be biased to think that the whole carrer of Eliot was a tacit endorsement of the general political trend of his age.In fact , he advances with the popular poetic tide only till the end of the secular phase of his carrer.His poetry reflects the fragmentation of a war ridden ,claustrophobic world. II. USE OF MYTH IN 'THE WASTE LAND' T.S.Eliot's “The Waste Land” is the most sustained and complex use of the mythical method.Taking as its underlying pattern the great myth as interpreted by Jessie Weston,Sir James Frazer,and others, and
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