Form Is Content

• Form
• Content
• Difficulty
• Questions

Form is Content: This poem is an excellent example of the connection of form and content: that is to say, in the form is the meaning.

Form: The poem is made of fragments. Eliot throws fragments, the jumbled pieces of a puzzle at the reader.

Fragments:

• Languages: English, German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek
• Allusions: many of the fragments or pieces of the puzzle are references (allusions) to the literature of past Western cultures: German opera of the nineteenth century, Dante's Commedia from the Italian Middle Ages, drama of the English Renaissance, the Bible, Latin, memoirs, Greek and Roman mythology, French poets, Shakespeare, St. Augustine of the fifth century, English and Russian novels of the nineteenth century, and more.
• Time: There is no narrative, no logical chronological sequence. Within a stanza the time may shift from the present to the past or vice versa. A stanza may begin with a time after the war (1914-1918) then the time may switch to prewar or an even more distant past.
• Point of View: there is no consistent point of view; quite a few of the stanzas begin with the third person and then shift to a first person speaker, who is in the middle of a conversation; we don't know the beginning or the end of that conversation.

Content:

• Fragment as Metaphor: the poem is made of fragments (bits and pieces of references to the past), just as twentieth century life is fragmented; the fragments in the poem mirror our fragmented lives; by fragmented I mean compartmentalized; in past eras --the ages of fertility religions and in the age of the medieval knight -- life was whole, and the spiritual permeated every aspect of life.
• the fragments of literature may also be a metaphor for the ruin of Western Europe's traditions and values; literature carries the values of the past; post WWI traditional values lie in shards (scattered pieces) throughout the poem; all we can do is pick our way through this Waste Land that is the poem, itself, without coherence, seemingly without meaning, just as we must pick our way through life, living without meaning (according to the poet).

Form is Difficult. Eliot makes a virtue of difficulty; the poem is not a case of the poet merely showing off his erudition (learning).

Content is Difficulty: if it is difficult to find meaning in the poem, so it is difficult to find meaning in the twentieth century. Reading the poem mirrors living. Two responses are possible: 1) the reader is indifferent; the poem is too difficult; the reader turns away from the challenge; so, too, this reader may be indifferent to life; finding the meaning of one's life, making sense of the world is too difficult; the reader turns away from the challenge, drinks too much, takes drugs, experiences meaningless joyless sexual relationships, as some of the characters in the poem; 2) the reader must work to find the meaning of the poem just as the inhabitant of the twentieth century must work to find meaning in the world. What better way to suggest this difficulty than in a purposefully difficult poem?

Questions: And like the quester of the Grail, the virtuous knight/reader can only restore the Waste Land of his world or the Waste Land of his inner life to health by asking the right question. To make sense of anything, a person must ask questions. Readers must ask themselves endless questions about the poem in order to understand it; just as one must ask questions about the meaning of life in order to understand it. Why am I here? Where and who is God? What am I supposed to do with my life?Is there a God? Why is there so much suffering in the world?