Eliot Poem "dramatic" Research

The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot is regarded as one of the chief exemplars of modernism in English literature. It had attracted lots of comments because of its obscurity and the anti-traditional and anti-rational techniques. Meantime Eliot himself was a theorist, who had published a number of academic articles. There are some conflicts among his characteristic, his literary theories and his poems. For examples, he declared his famous"non-personality"opinion in his article"Tradition and the Individual Talent", while he was a typical solipsist; he loved the traditional culture and classic literature, but he did reform the language of modern poetry. He was impressible to the society's pressure and his individual suffering, but he never agreed with the sentimentalism of romanticism. He advocated order and authority, while he broke them in The Waste Land and exhibited a fragmented world in it. There are so many dramatic contradictions on him. In fact,"dramatic"is an important word for Eliot, especially for his poetic theories and poems. It's well known that Eliot learned from the 17th-century English metaphysical poems and poetic dramas. What he learned affected his opinions about poetry and his poem writing. This paper tries to study The Waste Land from the point of view of"dramatic"in order to understand the poem's obscure fragments better and touch some principle of unity, moreover approach the nature of Eliot's brainchild. At last I hope to discover the value of some poetic means Eliot used, and connect his poetic theories with his poem to some degree. My discussion will start from Eliot's thought and his important poetic theories. The main content will focus on the following matters: the dramatic character helped achieve the goals of non-individual, and control of order and feelings in the poem.