INSPIRATION: TS Elliot
T.S Eliot’s imagery in the Waste Land is a soul searching for meaning in a crazy, dead world having lived through the tragedy of so many young men dying needlessly in the 1st World War. Although not experienced first-hand by Eliot, a poet cannot live through such a horror without being scathed in some way.
His own personal problems with an unhappy marriage and a mental state called at that time ‘neurasthenia’ perhaps the modern term for it would be ‘burnout’. His style of writing in The Waste Land was new; it did not contain a story in the traditional sense but through the fragmented jumping from one image or person speaking to another there runs a story for a quest for spiritual redemption.
INSPIRATION: Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932. She began writing poetry from the age of 8, as a young woman poet in the 1950’s, it was difficult for her to be accepted as someone of worth. Her poetry often had a raw autobiographical intensity, a truthful exploration of the soul, she was a confessional poet.
Losing her austere, strict father at the age of eight and with a possibly over dominant mother, her life ended with the tragic events of her broken marriage to Ted Hughes, resulting in her having to care for two young children on her own and with a tendency towards depression, inevitably led to her death by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Some say her best poetry was written in the year before she died.
