Art Of Contrast In The Waste Land

As one of the major founders of modernism and a chief figure in New Criticism, T. S. Eliot has greatly influenced the development of modern British and American poetry and determined the way poems were read and taught for nearly half a century. It is obvious that it is the great poem The Waste Land that much of Eliot's influence based on. The publication of The Waste Land in 1922 is one of the most important events in the twentieth-century poetry. As the distinguished critic Richard Ellmann has said: "The Waste Land becomes so famous that for much of this century, the latest poetry in Arabic, Swahili or Japanese was far more likely to have been influenced by Eliot than by earlier poets in those languages or by any other poet in English."In The Waste Land, Eliot skillfully uses allusions, symbols and contrasts, of which the contrast art is more significant and effective. So I set my analysis on the contrast art used in The Waste Land. This thesis is divided into four chapters to analyze the contrast technique used in four aspects in this poem: contrast in themes, contrast in characters, contrast in imagery and contrast in language style. And this thesis mainly focuses on the prominent role the contrast technique plays in the poem. Through the use of contrast art, Eliot paints the readers a vivid picture of the barren modern civilization and modern man's spiritual waste land, and he also points out the causes of the waste land and ways of its salvation, which shows the poet's eager desire and hope for the regeneration of the waste land.The contrast technique is a very important writing skill Eliot uses in The Waste Land. But we cannot neglect the following devices in it: sudden switches of scene, stream-of-consciousness device, motifs from classical and medieval myth, abundant allusions and marvelous symbolic images. All of the above techniques used together make The Waste Land such a great and excellent poem that the American critic Conrad Aiken called it "one of the most moving and original poems of our time".