The Waste Land

The Waste Land was written in 1921 and published in 1922, shortly after World War I, an unsettled time in European history. In the poem, the reader is being directly addressed, and because of this the poem continues in the tradition of the dramatic monologue, a genre brought to a 19th century apotheosis by Robert Browning in The Ring and the Book. Other similarities of The Waste Land to the accepted traditions of the genre are harder to come by.

In Browning's dramatic monologues, the speaker is clearly identified, the locale is specified, the time is given, the addressee is understood--all of this information coming either from the title of the poem or unfolded to the reader through the speaker's monologue. The monologue purports to be the actual words of the speaker, and the reader has the experience of becoming acquainted with the speaker through this monologue as though the reader were overhearing a conversation or as if he were the addressee. The reader is aware of the very details of the physical setting, the gestures and activity of the speaker

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nsists on "two quite distinctive protagonists" (34). If we look to Eliot to learn who is speaking, we find that one school of critics distrust Eliot's notes altogether and speak of their "interpretive inadequacy" (Menand 180); Eliot's notes are considered too much a part of the poem to be in any way explanatory. Nevertheless, it is worth our reading what Eliot has to say about Tiresias: Tiresias . . . is the most important personage of the poem, uniting all the rest . . . . What Tiresias sees, in fact is the substance of the poem (148). From this, many critics have inferred that Tiresias is the protagonist of the poem (Dick 72). A careful reading of this note shows that while Tiresias is identified specifically as "the most important personage in the poem," it is what he "sees" (Eliot's emphasis) that is "the substance" of the poem (Bolgan 32). This effectively eliminates him as the main protagonist. Furthermore, Eliot points out only that Tiresias "sees," but says nothing about what Tiresias speaks. To the casually educated reader, the speaker of the opening lines of The Waste Land appears to be a well-educated Englishman who would speak with ease and elegance. The sound of the words on reading moves into
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Approximate Word count = 4050
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)