The dramatic content of Eliot’s non-dramatic poetry: the waste land and other observations

Abstract

From the reading of The Waste Land and Eliot’s selected essays, this paper defends the thesis that the poet’s non-dramatic poetry discloses the constant desire to provide his verses with imagistic concreteness in order to confer a theatrical dimension to his poems. In order to do so, this text resorts, for instance, to the notions of “objective correlative” and “dissociation of sensibility,” which reveal the dramatic nature of Eliot’s poems. If the poet conceives modern poetry as a ritual, the presence, among others, of James Frazer and The golden bough in The Waste Land proves the dramatic aspect of the work.