The Nineteenth Century Wasteland

The modern poets used the term wasteland from various points of view, but the Victorians also used wasteland imagery with great effectiveness to alleviate their melancholy moods. These poets see barrenness in nature and see the bitter irony of love too that kills their senses. The best wasteland poetry is to be found in poems by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and inevitably the later poems of T. S. Eliot. In this paper, we want to study the process of purge, purgatory, and purification of their protagonists through their works. For Tennyson, it is an honest pursuit, for Arnold, it is almost like military enterprise, Browning's quest is like a holy traverse to the waste before the victory of the death to be attained. Thus, for Eliot, the wasteland is a place for the passive endurance of all the characters that exhibit in the postwar generation.