A Summary of The Waste Land by T.S Eliot

Dr Oliver Tearle, an English lecturer at Loughborough University, discusses the key themes within The Waste Land, the most prominent of which is the breakdown – the breakdown of marriages and relationships, psychological breakdowns, the breakdown of poetry and language, and even the breakdown of an entire world. Essentially, the poem looks at the affect which the First World War has had on civilisation – the only escape of which, is death. It’s a sobering concept, and one which T.S. Eliot addresses by dra