The Thematic Significance of the First-Person Pronouns in "The Waste Land" and "Vienna"

Abstract

This paper examines the use of the first-person pronouns in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Stephen Spender’s Vienna (1934) to argue that the different ways in which the first-person narrative is employed in each poem highlight the themes of fragmentation and socio-political oppression respectively. Literary critics have largely focused on analyzing the effectiveness of the poems in criticizing the political and social situations of the society they were written in, but little research to date has examined their use of the first-person pronoun. The first-person poetic voice is worth investigating as it provides insight on to what extent and by what means the poets themselves strive to enter their poems to deliver a (political) message to their generation which was suffering in the post-war period. In this paper, the identification processes of “I”s in The Waste Land are analyzed to determine their role in underscoring the poetic theme of fragmentation. Next, the juxtaposition of “we” with “they” in Vienna is studied to reveal the way in which it reflects the socio-political oppression that was going on against the socialists and the homosexuals in Europe at the time.