The Waste Land

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Structure

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Literary Devices Structure

Eliot organized The Waste Land into five distinct sections, each of which bears its own title:

1.   “The Burial of the Dead” (lines 1–76)
2.   “A Game of Chess” (lines 77–172)
3.   “The Fire Sermon” (lines 173–311)
4.   “Death by Water” (lines 312–21)
5.   “What the Thunder Said” (lines 322–433)

The complexity of each section’s internal structure exceeds what can be summarized here. Thus, for a complete overview of each of these five sections, please see our pages of summary and analysis. In his notes on The Waste Land, Eliot indicates that he derived “the plan” of the poem from a contemporary work of anthropology that analyzes medieval legends of the Holy Grail. This claim led many early critics to seek out a meaningful sense of wholeness in what otherwise appears to be “a heap of broken images” (line 22). However, more recent scholars have closely analyzed the poem’s compositional process, and they have concluded that, contrary to his statement, Eliot didn’t write the poem to a predetermined “plan.” Instead, the poem’s five-part structure emerged as a part of the process of composition, much like a collage slowly emerges as various bits and pieces are made to fit together. The structure of the poem results primarily from Eliot’s strategies of fragmentation and juxtaposition. He uses these strategies to reflect an overarching sense that modern life is unfolding in the shattered ruins of civilization.