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

Superficiality in The Waste Land The Waste Land is interested with the disillusionment of a generation. The poem was written in the early 1920s, a magazine of abject poverty, heightening unemployment and much devastation unresolved from the end of WW1 in 1918. Despite this, or because of it, heap made a conscientious private road to enjoy themselves. In doing so they lost their direction, their beliefs and their individuality. They were victims of the class system which keep a system of privilege, snobbery and distrust. Advances in machinery brought new products onto the market, like cars, entirely the people were so disillusioned with the social turmoil caused by 4 years of war, that even the glamour of new possessions could not fill the ghostly and emotional void left-hand(a) by the war. The consciousness of a tribe had been battered into submission by the horrors of the first solid ground war that people now were living a shell of what was once life. People went through and through the motions of life but there was no feeling just a mechanical liveence. This kind of surface existence, the inability to see beyond the obvious, is portrayed throughout the Wasteland. The Wasteland is a soulless picture of a world deprived of fertility. Everything has become sterile in this barren landscape, people pay nowhere left to look but to the outer shell because the indoors is emotionally dead. As a result, the characters of The Wasteland ar superficial in every sense of the word. Some are obsessed with appearance. Others are so far detached from the things that make life more than just existing and looking good, that they perpetuate the destructive cycle that is slowly killing them and their world. They exist without hope, faith and spiritual enlightenme... ...t could bring life to the Wasteland, then there would be hope. Water of course becomes symbolic of faith. Eliots message is if we had faith, then the world would receive to take root again. Eliot suggests that our superficiality 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 reject enlightenment because they are too concerned with appearances, money and other such inconsequential matters that they find lost the ability to recognize what is needed to make life better. Do You cheat nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember vigour?Works CitedEliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Harcourt Brace & Company tender York, 1958.