The Waste Land
Map:
Analysis:
_ The
locations mentioned in The Wasteland were clustered around The City of London at
the East End. The London Bridge and the
London Financial district (marked by the stock exchange) are mentioned
frequently (2 times a piece), while prisons (taken to be the Tower of London)
are mentioned 3 times. The most
frequently mentioned places are the London Docks and Sailing (marked by a wharf
district for mapping purposes), with a total of 6 references. This directly relates to the text, which was
filled with ocean imagery and metaphors.
Also included in Elliot’s The
Waste Land are many single references to streets and churches in the City
of London, like King William Street, Queen Victoria Street, and Lower Thames
Street, as well as Magnus Martyr and Saint Mary Woolnoth Churches. Outside of the City of London, on the East
End, the City of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs are mentioned as well. These were both industrial areas, with
Greenwich being a manufacturing region and the Isle of Dogs being a shipping
district that gained its business reputation from its docks. The major outliers in the data come from
areas such as Common Street, (which may have greater symbolic significance in
name than location) the Metropole, (which was a luxury hotel in the west end),
and the Ionian (a hotel in Camden). The
most mentioned areas in The Waste Land are
locations of labor, whether it is manual labor, like Greenwich and the docks,
or intellectual labor, like the Isle of Dogs and the financial district. The very few relaxing locations mentioned are
either fishermen’s pubs or very luxurious hotels like the Metropole. From the data collected, it can be inferred that
T.S. Elliot views London as a very hard working city, yet because of the nature
of his poem this can also be seen symbolically as its downfall. The locations are clustered in working areas straying
little from this pattern with the theme of desolation and emptiness; these
areas can be liberally viewed as the center of the hollowness of modern life.
Raw Data:
waste_land-reese.xlsx | |
File Size: | 13 kb |
File Type: | xlsx |
Graph of All References:
Table of All References:
Works Cited:
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Waste Land. New York: Horace Liveright, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2011. www.bartleby.com/201/1.html
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Waste Land. New York: Horace Liveright, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2011. www.bartleby.com/201/1.html