Wasteland analysis
1. Introduction In the epigraph to The Waste Land the Sybil, a woman with prophetic abilities, looks at the future and proclaims that the only thing she wants is to die. Her pessimism about the future is the first indication of the idea which develops into the central theme of the poem: the decay of the human civilization. In this paper I am going to concentrate on interpretation of the motif of decay and its meanings in The Waste Land . The poem was published in 1922 and appears to be a typical literary example of Modern poetry. That’s why I decided to adopt the New Critical perspective for my paper. New Criticism is the literary theory which dominated in the early 20th century and was used especially for interpretations of poetry. In this paper I will refer to the main statements of the New Critical theory described by I. A. Richards. [1] The New Criticical approach states that every literary text is autonomous . Historical context and biography of the author are irrelevant fo
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