Heap Of Broken Images How accurately does this describe the poetry of T S Eliot
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"(The Waste Land) was conceived as a somewhat loose medley, as the relief of more diffuse impulses" Hugh Kenner - 'The Invisible Poet T.S. Eliot'
In the context of The Waste Land how much was Eliot's poetry a "heap of broken images"? To elaborate on Hugh Kenner's point one might think the poem was indeed a literary expansion of various opinions of Eliot's, captured in no particular order and with a distinct lack of structure. On first perusal one could be forgiven for agreeing with this; the poem takes on a proliferation of different scenes and characters with little to no confluence immediately obvious. The nature of this owes much to the challenging demeanour of modernist movement; the rejection of principled modes of literature. Yet when one works closely with the text the original perception of a disjointed, unsystematic mode of poertry diminishes almost to extinction. Again, it is Kenner who comments on this: "The past exists in fragments precisely because nobody cares what it meant, it will unite itself and come alive in the mind of anyone who succeeds in caring". In such a manner one is able, through close study of the poem, to see that Eliot himself, while giving the poem a modernist facade, included in it not only several themes but a distinct structure with which to unite the various fragments.
The structure, while not immediately apparent, originates from the third section of the poem; Madame Sosotris' prophecising...