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In twentieth-century poets such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, the literary apocalyptic--identifiable by its homology with the major elements of the biblical Apocalypse--undergoes progressively complex transmutations. While in the early Yeats the apocalyptic is evocative of earnest Romantic moods, in his later work it is complicated by irony, yoked to the cycles of Yeatsean history, and counteracted by exaggerated postures of defiance. In Eliot, a reductive juxtaposition of the apocalyptic and the contemporary foreshortens the traditional paradigms to a diminutive modern-day scale. In Lowell, the apocalyptic is manifested variously as a bitter inversion of American Puritan eschatology, the telescoping of the personal and the cosmic, and a catastrophe in slow-motion. The climactic point of distortion, however, is reached in Ginsberg's poetry in which apocalyptic horrors form a bizarre combination with humour and bathos. While their treatment of the eschatological is widely divergent, an element common to all four poets is their ambivalence towards the paradigms of an apocalyptic new world.

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This essay demonstrates how three popular writers of the twentieth century have created novels that contain echoes of Eliot's poem. They are F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and John Steinbeck's To a God Unknown (1933). I chose these particular novels because they exemplify widely different and distinctive echoes of the poem. Fitzgerald's use of waste land imagery is readily perceptible the most effective in defining and summing up the temper of the Jazz Age in America. Hemingway's borrowing lies principally in parallel characterization (Jake Barnes as he Fisher King is the outstanding example) and in depicting a morally and spiritually bankrupt world by showing that a satisfactory sexual relationship between man and woman is impossible. Steinbeck's borrowing is unique. HIs novel not only contains the Fisher King figure, desert land imagery, water motif, and the quest theme, but his protagonist, Joseph Wayne, like Eliot's Fisher King-Tiresias protagonist, is able to metamorphose from one "personage" into another. Steinbeck's borrowings are not used by him for the purpose of depicting the world of the Twenties, or any era. He may have done no more than build upon a piece of literature from the immediate past as Eliot had done from the more remote past when he created The Waste Land. There is also a possibility that Steinbeck disagrees with some of Eliot's philosophical ideas and playfully chides the poet for harboring them. In showing the nfluence of the poem on three important American novelists, perhaps this essay will disprove Karl Shapiro's statement that "at no point in the career of Eliot has there been the slightest indication of literary following,"5 and will furnish proof that Robert E. Knoll's statement regarding the influence of The Waste Land is a valid one: What The Rape of the Lock was to the Augustans and Tintern Abbey to the Romantics, The Waste Land has become to the Moderns, It is inescapable.6

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