Discussion Questions:
2506:

• What characterized the French symbolist poets?

• Explain:  "Our isolation from others derives from, and tragically mirrors, our isolation from ourselves" (2507).
• What is the "dissociation of sensibility"?
• What does the New Criticism involve?
• Explain:  "The Wasteland forcibly changed the idiom that contemporary poetry must adopt if it were to remain contemporary" (2507).
• Explain:  "The Wasteland . . . looks unified because we readers look for it to be unified" (2507).

• What is Eliot's main argument?
• How is Eliot's discussion modernist?

• Explain Eliot's reference to archaeology.
• How would being "more critical" make the French "less spontaneous"?
• Explain:  "We shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously" (2544).
• Explain:  "If you want [tradition] you must obtain it by great labour" (2544).

• Explain: "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence" (2545).
• Explain:  "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone" (2545).
• Explain:  "The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past" (2545).
• Explain:  "To conform merely would be for the new work really not conform at all" (2545).
• Explain:  "Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same" (2545).

• Explain:  "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" (2546).
• What happens "when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulfur dioxide" (2546)?
• Explain:  "The mind of the mature poet" is "a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations" (2546). How does this view compare with Wordsworth's in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads?

• How, according to Eliot, is the mind of the poet like a shred of platinum?
• What, according to Eliot, is the relationship between the emotions and the artistic process? How does this view compare with Wordsworth's?

• Explain:  "The business of a poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all" (2548).
• Explain Eliot's reformulation of Wordsworth's poetic formula of "emotion recollected in tranquility."
• Explain:  "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" (2548).

• Explain:  "The emotion of art is impersonal" (2549).

• To what degree does this poem reflect the sentiments found in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"?  Explain.

• Explain the significance of the title.
• To whom is the speaker speaking?
• What women are being discussed in line 13?
• What literary technique is being employed in lines 15-22?

• Explain lines 31-34.
• Explain the question in lines 45-46.
• How does one measure out one's life in coffee spoons?
• Explain the image in lines 57-58.
• What is the significance of the brown hair in line 64?

• Explain the image of the ragged claws.
• What shift has occurred between lines 86 and 87?
• Explain the reference to John the Baptist.
• Explain the reference to Lazarus.
• Explain the reference to Prince Hamlet.

• Explain the final three lines.

• Who are the magi?
• Is this a religious poem?  Explain.
• What is the significance of the old white horse (25)?
• Explain the speaker's question in lines 35-36.
• Explain:  "this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death" (38-39).
• Explain the final four lines.