The Waste Land

The form of the poem is at once conservative and radical. There are no fixed stanza forms. Each section, identified by its own title, maintains its own stanzaic sequencing, thus creating a feeling of fragmentation. Grounded in the classical expressions of Renaissance and Elizabethan verse, Eliot uses one of that era’s signature forms—blank verse, a grand and stately verse form designed to elevate speech into august poetic form without the singsong-y distractions of insistent regular rhyming. Deftly, Eliot imbeds subtle rhyming echoes within and between lines to enhance the aural experience, but the poem is largely unrhymed. Although blank verse can use any one of a number of formal structures, Eliot uses part iambic pentameter—one of the most traditional and recognizable verse forms recalling the iconic tragedies of William Shakespeare and the grand verse meditations of John Milton.

That Eliot uses such an elevated form to recreate the moral corruption of a world adrift in inanities—bored and amused to spiritual paralysis by its own irrelevancy—creates the irony central to the poem’s scathing indictment of its era. Each line alternates between stressed and unstressed syllables, lending itself to elevated recitation and allowing for dramatic pauses and subtle emphasis.