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T.S. Eliot's, "The Waste Land" & Irregularity.

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T.S. Eliot's, "The Waste Land" & Irregularity.

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Another example of irregularity is found within Eliot's Modernist epic poem, "The Waste Land".  Eliot follows no specific metre, rhyme scheme, or form, mostly free verse. Part of that irregular form can be seen in the following example:

"III. The Fire Sermon"

"The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf/

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind/

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed./

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song." (173-176).

There is no rhythmic pattern, no poetic meters, nothing that could make this sound like a song of some sort, which is ironic seeing as though at the end of the last line (176), Eliot suggests that he is in fact singing a song of his own. -K.S.

"II. A Game of Chess"
" “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

“What is that noise?”

The wind under the door.

“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”

Nothing again nothing.

“Do

“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

“Nothing?” " (111-123).
Speaking is in itself irregular and this might be the reason for the way that Eliot decides to pose this section of the poem, but it further elaborates the irregularity that a lot of modern poems are being written as. -WM

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Modern poetry involves a lot of work relating to the intellectual mind, sometimes referring to the subconscious mind. This might be where a poet refers to something from their past and didn't realize it until later on in life that it meant more than previously thought. -WM

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Modernist Poetry is irregular, written without metre and rhyme scheme and sometimes written in prose like the prose poem.

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"Brushing from whom the stiffened puke/ i put him all into my arms/ and staggered banged with terror through/ a million billion trillion stars." (21-24).

What begins as a man trying to be a good samaritan, quickly turns into a reality check on how disgusting the deed truly is.  The sentence, "staggered banged with terror through," (23), not only creates an image of him carrying this drunk man, but emphasizes how difficult it is, seeing as though the drunk man is unconscious, completely unaware of his behavior.  It shows that life is not always perfect, that people struggle, and the situation doesn't always look pretty (or smell good). -K.S.

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Characteristic #2: Subconscious Mind Example

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Characteristic #2: Subconscious Mind Example

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In "My Papa's Waltz", by Theodore Roethke, it touches on the subject that his father is an alcoholic, although at the time he might have not noticed it.
"The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:" (1-3).
The relation to the whiskey on the father's breath and to death seems like a foreshadow to what might happen to the father. Like noted before, it was in the speaker's subconscious when he reminisced about his father's whiskey breath.-WM

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E.E Cummings poem "[O sweet spontaneous]", has a way of having and irregular flow, but despite the the way the poem is written, it creates a sense of breath at the end of each line.
For instance,
"O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting.."
which once read, one can note how it was written not to have a set stanza breakdown.
-WM

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Modernist Poetry is interested in the ugly side of life and in taboo subjects like drug addiction, crime, prostitution and some other subjects. "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke, and "a man who had fallen among thieves", by E.E. Cummings both discuss alcoholics and how they affect those who are trying to help them. -K.S.

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Our goal is to make connections across poems. Include support from Eliot's "The Waste Land" and 3 additional poems that represent modernism.