A Comparative Study of the Death Concept in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” &al-Sayyab’s Poetry

زبان و ادبیات عربی

Article 1, Volume 5, Issue 8, August 2013   

Document Type: research article

DOI: 10.22067/jall.v5i8.24188

Author

Ali Akbar Ahmadi Chenari^*

Abstract

Death is one of the most inspiring concepts in most of well-known contemporary Western and Arab poets’works,including T.S. Eliot and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s. It plays a unique role in shaping the modern poetry. This paper contains a comparative archetypal-based analysis of symbolic aspects of death in “The Waste Land”, the most famous literary work by T.S.Eliot whose impression on al-Sayyab was extensive. The basis of the literary analysis in the field of psychoanalytic criticism is Jung's theory of archetypes. According to him, archetypes model human behavior and are primordial concepts and images accumulated during time as collective unconsciousness, and human is inspired by them to evolve instinctively his own character. Poetic inspiration is one important field through which Jungian archetypes display themselves. This paper studies these symbolic features common in “The Waste Land” and al-Sayyab’s poetry.

Keywords

Eliot; The Waste Land; al-Sayyab; death; archetype