Questions about The Waste Land

Here is a list of questions that people in the class posed about The Waste Land (sometimes edited for brevity/clarity).

General

• What is the poem’s overall meaning and theme?



• How are the five sections of the poem connected?



• What was the use of the many speakers and personae?



• Why does Eliot use so many quotations? So many languages?



• There are many references to Dante; is there plot significance?



• How does the rhyme scheme, or lack thereof, affect the meaning of the poem?



• Each section seems like a new story with different narrators; I wonder if the poem could possibly be modeled after the Canterbury Tales.



• Were the five sections meant to be one poem or five poems that just have similar themes?



• What does the title mean? What exactly is the Waste Land?



• Why does he talk about water and rocks?



• What purpose do all the sexual references serve?



• Is death the central theme? Or does each section have its own theme or idea and they all tie in together somehow?



• Why and how are death and sexuality connected? Why is sexuality portrayed as such a horrid thing?

I. The Burial of the Dead

• I don’t understand the point of the girl Marie’s memories in the beginning.

II. A Game of Chess

• In ll. 111-123, is there a dialogue occurring? How many people are speaking? In the first stanza, it seems like the speaker is alone.



• Why does the narrator interject with “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”?

III. The Fire Sermon

• Who is Mrs. Porter?



• I wish to know if the typist was raped or not. This puzzles me because the typist felt indifferent toward the sexual act.



• Is “The Fire Sermon” connected to other aspects of the poem because it deals with the end of summer?



• I’m still unsure about the Tiresias passage; what is an old Greek wise man doing peeking in on the couple?



• In “The Fire Sermon,” what is going on after the scene with the typist being raped?

IV. Death by Water

• What is the significance of “death by water”?



• What is the purpose of this section?

V. What the Thunder Said

• The ending of the poem has quotes in two different languages; what is the significance of their juxtaposition?



• What is “What the Thunder Said” about?



• Why is section 5 considered the best part of Eliot’s work?



• What is the significance of the end?

Biographical questions

• What audience did Eliot have in mind while writing the poem?



• What inspired Eliot to write this poem?



• Was Eliot a sadist or a nihilist?