2022 MGA Arts Festival Presentation on Eliot's _The Waste Land_. Transcript: https://grlucas.com/recovery

1. “Shored Against My Ruins”
Eliot’s Road to Recovery in
The Waste Land
Gerald R. Lucas
MGA Arts Festival
March 29, 2022

2. 20th-Century Disruption
❖ T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
❖ World War I (1914–1918)
❖ ~ 40 million casualties
❖ Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918–1920)
❖ 17–100 million dead
❖ Charles Darwin, Origin (1859)
❖ Karl Marx, Kapital (1867)
❖ Sigmund Freud, Dreams (1899)
❖ Albert Einstein, Relativity (1905)

3. Emphasized the Artist’s Vision
Modernism
The artists of modernism turned inward. Truth became
relative, subjective, and personal, lacking absolutes.
Fluctuating reality became the basis of modernist
interpretation of the universe, and the artist must reinvent
art to match his/her personal vision.

4. “Shall I at least set