467 TS Eliot and The Waste Land (with Jed Rasula)
The History of Literature
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The Collage Aspect of the Wasteland
The most profound aspect of the wasteland that has an undisputable source and resource in modernism across the arts is the use of collage. Pound was trying to come up with ways to track historical resonances across time in other words moments of epiphany that would span generations from Renaissance Florence to the 18th century to the 20th century. The wastelands ended up being a much more successful demonstration of the possibilities of collage for English poetry than anything in the cantos would turn out to be.
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