the waste land myth and symbols in the great gatsby

He is in favor of finding something that can be enjoyed and at the same time be put into his poem as an allusion or reference. This definition makes it clearly easier to understand the use of many allusions and references in Eliot’s work.Įliot in his essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent” defines it further. For this very reason Eliot accomplished the “Eliot’s Notes” to clarify only some of these aspects.īefore going further, let’s define what is intertextuality? Julia Kristeva defines its usage as it is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is in fact made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive feature s of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary conventions and procedures that are “always-already” in place and constitute the discourses into which we are born. In other words it was hard to really understand this type of poetry without authors hints. The way they represented these problems were chaotic, dispersed and scattered. This collage or rather mosaic was more and more present representing the problems of the age. The concept of intertextuality was introduced. It was rather an intricate piece of work that spurred a lot of controversy at the beginning but at th same time it renewed and refreshed the English scene with beautiful poetry. New form of poetry was not in rhyme and symmetrically divided.

This was the complete opposite, there was no order, nothing was predicted, form changed and peoples new actions and interests emerged into surface. After this age of immense literary work, came the Modern Age. The Victorian Age, an age of order, didactic poetry, highly predictabe and formed in certain conditions that remained alive and followed by writers of the age was over. The notion of tradition and the archetypes of literature will be elaborated as well, in accordance with the nature of the paper, to introduce the reader the reasons behind. The study will focus also on the multitude of intertextual paradigm present in the poem, classifying the elements taken from, mythology, religion and literature. This study will bring a clear definition of this concept and the way Elliot used it in “The Waste Land”.

The aim of this paper is to introduce and analyze an important aspect in modern poetry, that of intertextuality.

The waste land myth and symbols in the great gatsby