Intertextuality and Literary Influence: A Study of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and W.B. Yeats' The Second Coming

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between two well-known modernist poems. It makes a comparison between The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922) and The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats (1919). The two poems demonstrate the disappointment of people in culture and spirituality after the World War I. Through the concept of intertextuality of Julia Kristeva, the paper examines how the two writers disintegrated their poems into fragments, employed images of apocalypse, and mentioned myths to express concerns about the disintegration of the society and alteration of history. The paper examines the poems as talking to one another, demonstrating how the work by Eliot responds to and builds up on the conclusions made by Yeats regarding repeating history and spirit crisis. Through close reading and studying of old records of Eliot reading Yeats, the study reveals that despite the two poets drawing their particular concern with the falling of civilization, they differed in their ideas: Yeats was attracted to the mystical process of the repetition cycle whereas Eliot sought to seek spiritual healing in the fragments of the pieces. The findings can be used by the academicians of modernist literature to demonstrate how intertextuality aided poets to generate new literature and criticize the society in the early twentieth century. This study provides a significant gap in the contemporary comparison of modernism by offering an in-depth examination of the poem echoes in the poems. It reveals that their relationship transcends the common past and is an intellectual discussion of art.