Could someone explain this to me? I don't get it.

>>9446565
It's using the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King as a metaphor for the devastation caused by WW1

Start with the Greeks.

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time.

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.

Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)

And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Anon?

>>9446565

It's a joke on critics showing how you can write the most random shit and people will make up all sorts of crazy theories trying to explain what's actually nonsense.

>>9446623
based Obama

>>9446583
This is part of it, the other major theme being that now that WWI has happened there is no returning to making great works of art, all the beauty and genius of the Renaissance is lost, and humanity will never return to that level of artistry again.

So artists just like the Fisher King are left with nothing but the wasteland of modernity, governed by science and practicality. Religion is dead and any sense of the glory of war is dead. People no longer introduce themselves by their family names or identify the town they grew up in, we are now just "Petals on a wet black bough."

Eliot sees people not care for the tradition of art, dwell in ignorance among the shattered world after the war, thinks everything is depraved and no one is trying or knows to try. I don't interpret that he thinks all is lost, but it's like a warning that people are living lifelessly among the ruins and artifacts of a once glorious tower everyone was working to build, and he wishes people would realize where they are at and decide what to do next.

>>9446622

The references to Hinduism pre-date your precious Athenian boy fuckers

>>9446623
thanks Obama

>>9446687
God bless science and practicality