Waste Landscapes and Poetic Renewal in Modernist Poetry

This paper examines how Modernist poetry addresses ‘waste landscape’ or ‘waste’ as both a theme and aesthetic device, revealing a ‘waste management’ re-negotiation with the content and form of the poetry. I investigate how a complex renegotiation presented ‘waste’ under the new forms of meaning and knowledge. Through various kinds of bolder rearrangements made by the modernists, the waste landscapes are fixed into a new jigsaw, of an exteriorized other ‘self.’ I analyse the works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, H.D., Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Wallce Stevens, to befittingly re-read into these waste landscapes.