Aestheticism can not only be used to refer to ‘good taste’, the objective beauty of a text, but also to the value of it. This value can be due to its complexity and the challenge in interpretation it offers the reader, its display of semantic skill and use of ‘literary language’ or if the subject matter is considered of sufficient moral and philosophical significance, giving the audience an insight into fundamental ideas.
The Wasteland: What the Thunder Said was written by T.S Eliot in 1922 as part of a poem that recounts in astonishing diversity the universal struggles of the human condition. This section of the poem portrays with monotonous detail an apocalyptic scene with religious undertones, perhaps in allegorical reference to WW1, to illuminate the horrors of war and depict the emotional aftermath; a broken world, filled with crippling hopelessness and …show more content…
In this way, the poem reads more like a simple narrative than a canonical piece, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. There are connotations of ecclesiastical scripts in both sections, highlighted by Eliot’s use of phrases such as “Who is the third who walks always beside you - only you and I together but when I look ahead - another walking beside you” and the steady, resonant incantation “Then spoke the thunder”. This suggests quite simple, archaic writing, implying that, linguistically, the Wasteland is not an aesthetically beautiful piece. Whereas many works in the literary canon come easily to the reader through linguistic technique and appropriate syntax, coming alive when read, in the Wasteland there is a noticeable lack of similes and small scale metaphor to aid in description, with devices such as personification, enjambment and caesuras being few and far between, causing the poem to plod along in a more literal rather than figurative
The Wasteland: What the Thunder Said was written by T.S Eliot in 1922 as part of a poem that recounts in astonishing diversity the universal struggles of the human condition. This section of the poem portrays with monotonous detail an apocalyptic scene with religious undertones, perhaps in allegorical reference to WW1, to illuminate the horrors of war and depict the emotional aftermath; a broken world, filled with crippling hopelessness and …show more content…
In this way, the poem reads more like a simple narrative than a canonical piece, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. There are connotations of ecclesiastical scripts in both sections, highlighted by Eliot’s use of phrases such as “Who is the third who walks always beside you - only you and I together but when I look ahead - another walking beside you” and the steady, resonant incantation “Then spoke the thunder”. This suggests quite simple, archaic writing, implying that, linguistically, the Wasteland is not an aesthetically beautiful piece. Whereas many works in the literary canon come easily to the reader through linguistic technique and appropriate syntax, coming alive when read, in the Wasteland there is a noticeable lack of similes and small scale metaphor to aid in description, with devices such as personification, enjambment and caesuras being few and far between, causing the poem to plod along in a more literal rather than figurative