On The Expression Of Love In The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot is one of the twentieth century’s major poets and literary critics and has been widely studied both at home and abroad. The Waste Land is one of his most influential and widely read poems and yet its interpretation is far from exhausted. This thesis tries to explore the expression of love in this poem according to Eliot’s theory of poetic emotion.Introduction analyzes Eliot’s terms "impersonality","the objective correlative" and "unification of sensibility" and summarizes Eliot’s theory of poetic emotion:a poet should use his creativity and intelligence to transmute his personal emotion into the poetic emotion of a poem by means of objective correlatives in order to achieve unification of idea and emotion, reason and sensibility, and subjectivity and objectivity.The main body discusses the expression of love in The Waste Land and points out that under its seemingly fragmentary structure and fresh technique of impersonality there is an emotional core of The Waste Land, which is closely related with Eliot’s personal experience of love.Chapter one discusses Eliot’s pursuit of ideal love. Eliot’s personal emotion of his first love is transmuted into the poetic emotion by means of the objective correlatives. He utilizes the image of spring to express his desire for ideal love, Marie’s sled ride to express his imagination about the ecstasy from ideal love, and the hyacinth girl to embody his ideal love.Chapter two discusses the failure of ideal love. In the poem, Eliot presents two reasons for the failure of ideal love:spiritually, man doubts about the truthiness of his ideal love and feels despair about his life, which is manifested by the thought of the lover of the hyacinth girl and fortune telling of Madame Sosostris respectively. Physical reasons for the failure of ideal love include the impotence of man and the senescence of woman, which is manifested by the allusion to the mythology of the Fisher King and myth of Sybil and Apollo. Here the failure of ideal love corresponds to Eliot’s failed experience of love. Chapter three discusses suffering from the failed love. Eliot’s suffering in his unfortunate marriage is also transmuted into the poetic emotion through objective correlatives. He utilizes the image of the dog and episode of the nervous wife and the indifferent husband and the episode of the tired typist and the carbuncular clerk and the legend of the Rhine’s daughter to indicate that suffering of the failed love will constantly haunt one’s memory, torment one’s mind, cause one to suffer in lust and finally lose faith in love.Chapter four discusses salvation from suffering by means of turning to Christianity and Buddhism. Jesus Christ sacrifices himself to atone for human beings’sin; Buddhism tells human to "give, sympathise, and control". Eliot hints that only by giving sympathy to others and controlling his own personality can he gain peace, love and happiness, which corresponds to his theory of impersonality.In conclusion, this thesis points out that although Eliot attempts to use fresh techniques and devices in The Waste Land, such as allusion, fragmentation, impersonality and objective correlatives to escape his personal emotion, at the core of The Waste Land, there is an explicit expression of his personality and emotion.