Waste Land Essay: Superficiality in The Waste Land -- T.S. Eliot Waste

Superficiality in The permissive waste Land The Waste Land is c one timerned with the disillusionment of a generation. The poem was written in the former(a) 1920s, a time of abject poverty, heightening unemployment and much devastation unsolved from the end of WW1 in 1918. Despite this, or because of it, people made a conscientious effort to enjoy themselves. In doing so they lost their direction, their beliefs and their individuality. They were victims of the separate system which maintained a system of privilege, snobbery and distrust. Advances in machinery brought brisk products onto the market, like cars, but the people were so disillusioned with the social hullabaloo caused by four years of war, that even the glamour of new possessions could not fill the spiritual and emotional void left by the war. The knowingness of a nation had been battered into submission by the horrors of the first human beings war that people now were living a shell of what was once life. People we nt through the motions of life but there was no tonicity just a mechanical existence. This kind of surface existence, the inability to suppose beyond the obvious, is portrayed throughout the Wasteland. The Wasteland is a soulless range of a world deprived of fertility. Everything has become sterile in this unembellished landscape, people have nowhere left to look but to the outer(a) shell because the inside is emotionally dead. As a result, the characters of The Wasteland argon fiddling in every sense of the word. Some are ghost with appearance. Others are so far detached from the things that arrange life more than than just breathing and looking good, that they perpetuate the destructive cycle that is tardily killing them and their world. They exist without hope, faith and spiritual enlightenme... ...t could bring life to the Wasteland, because there would be hope. Water of course becomes symbolic of faith. Eliots message is if we had faith, indeed the world would begin to take root again. Eliot suggests that our shallowness is replaced by Datta... Dayadhvam..Dumyata give, sympathise, control. Our superficial nature has left us in an uncontrollable, unsympathetic, mean wasteland. In short, superficiality is portrayed throughout The Wasteland. Those who inhabit the land exist without faith and baulk enlightenment because they are too concerned with appearances, money and other such(prenominal) inconsequential matters that they have lost the ability to recognize what is needed to make life better. Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?Works CitedEliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Harcourt straddle & Company New York, 1958.