A Reading of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land from the Perspectives of Cubist Painting

Abstract

This paper is a reading of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, particularly its two secctions, "The Burial of the Dead" and "A Game of Chess," from the perspectives of painting, in particulare Cubist painring. Poetry and painting make use of two different media, one the language, the other line and color, but the two media are dealt with on the basis of the same principles, and thus there are many things in common. Although The Waste Land belongs to the Modernist tradition, it is different from the Modernist poetry created by Cubist poets, such as Gertrude Stein and the poet Pablo Picasso, in that at first sight Eliot's still maintains its efforts to make sense of what th speaker in the poem says and thinks while the Cubist poetry looks far more radical than T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. But the fact is that Eliot's is not as traditional as it looks while Stein's and Picasso's are more coherent and easier. This paper discusses why and how The Waste Land resembles some aspects of the Cubist practice in painting, in particular Picasso's paintiing, and claims that the poem is part of the Cubist movement in the 20th century.