![]() ![]() For instance, the marriage of Albert and Lil in ‘A Game of Chess’, the second section of the poem which I have analysed here, is anything but sterile: she’s had five children already, as the speaker tells us, nearly died giving birth to the fifth, and had to take pills to ‘bring … off’ the sixth. And waste or sterility is often not the problem, but what is growing amongst it. ![]() These poems are often more hopeful (even if cautiously hopeful) about the post-war world, but in Eliot we find a bleaker vision. I have written a whole book about the modernist long poem, The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem, and naturally The Waste Land figures in a large part of the analysis, alongside lesser-known but fascinating poems of the 1920s by other modernists, including female modernists: poems such as Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem and Nancy Cunard’s Parallax, both of which were published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. What The Waste Land is really about is fear of fecundity or fertility amidst that waste: the curious ways in which life continues to propagate and breed in such unpromising spiritual and social surroundings. But this seems to be a misreading of the poem. ![]()
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