Elliot vs. Modernism

After reading T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land, I can see why people might object to calling him a true Modernist. When i started reading this work i was having trouble trying to grasp his whole concept behind this complicated poem. i think i now know what you meant when you said that this poem is difficult. But, to do this blog assisgnment i realized that we dont have to understand what Elliot is saying; i only have to pull out concepts which i thought would be related to a modernists' writing. The way we described modernism in class, i got the idea that modernism is based around certain ideas or priciples -- these ideas include violence in terms of a form of identity, the rise of technology, and the rise of the social class system. Right away one of those ideas can be thrown away in this poem because i cant recall one time in the text when technology had been mentioned. there is also no real mention of the class system here either. Because those two ideas are missing from this poem i can see why people might not look at Elliot as being a modernist. On the other side, people might classify Elliot as a modernist after reading this poem because this text is all about death and destruction -- it has an all around dark and sinister feel to it. right away, just from raeding the title of the the first chapter "the burial of the dead" we can sense something dark about it. in the last section of this first chapter the speaker walks through London that is populated by ghosts of the dead. again, the title of the fourth chapter is "death by water" and is a brief description of man's death by drowning. the first section of the final chapter is all about destruction. it talks about how famous cities are destroyed then rebuilt then destroyed again. because of this notion of violence in this poem, critics might classify Elliot as a modernist.