Waste Land
A Fragmentary Wholeness
By Marianne Thormahlen
January 1978
Lund University Press
Distributed by
ISBN: 9140046486
248 pages
$82.50 Paper Original
Few poems have been as diversely interpreted as The Waste Land. Many critics have started from some particular aspect which seemed especially significant to them, regarding the entire poem from a fixed point of view. This new study adopts a more flexible approach. The traditional problems facing the Waste Land reader are reconsidered against the evidence of the text itself. New aspects are also brought forward, and the development of the poem is discussed in detail. The investigation is conducted on the basis of a close reading of the poem, whose essentially paradoxical nature is not distorted by the exaggerated rationalisations which have characterized many of this book's predecessors.
