The Waste Land and Guernica Assignment

The poem, "The Waste Land", written by T.S Elliot and the painting, "Guernica", painted by Picasso are connected through the very similar dark and gloomy images and themes that were used throughout both works of art. The images used in "Guernica" portray dark themes such as terror, fear, suffering and loss. The violence and chaos of the painting screams out at the audience through images such as engulfing fires, mourning, screaming and terrified women, dead soldiers and horribly wounded animals. These similar types of dark images were also used in the poem, "The Waste Land", through words and phrases such as "slimy", "dull", "gashouse", "wreck", "death" and "demotic". In the painting "Guernica", there are images of a dead soldier, cast away bones and skulls that were thematically connected and similar to a specific part in the poem, "Musing upon the king my brother's wreck/And on the king my father's death before him/White bodies naked on the low damp ground/And bones cast in a little low dry garret" (5-8). The clear and dark images used in this poem were very closely connected to the violent images used in the painting. The two works of art also have a similar dark, gloomy and mournful atmosphere to them.

The overall goal of modernist poets and painters was to allow confusion and questions to enter the minds of the readers and the audience. They wanted their audience to "think outside of the box" and to allow their minds to wander freely regarding the nature of their poems and paintings. These two works of modernist art do exactly that. The meaning of the poem or painting isn't obvious and doesn't jump out at you at first sight. It allows their audience to think about what they are looking at or reading.

Modernists also wanted to differ greatly from the Romantic/Victorian works of art. The poetry and paintings from the Romantic/Victorian era were ordered, repressed, optimistic and very obvious, where as the works of art created by modernists were unstable, free of thought, unstructured and most often pessimistic. The paintings from the Victorian era portrayed images that very obvious and not much thought had to be put in by the audience to figure out the meaning of the painting or the intent of the painter. The modernists introduced works of art that were abstract, often dark and they had to be studied closely in order to figure out the message the painter is trying to send to their audience. The painting, "Guernica", displays an abundance of dark, violent and chaotic images that are abstract and deformed in order to signify and emphasize the message trying to be sent to the audience. Picasso demonstrates the brutality of the German attack on Guernica, through the terrifying images of suffering women, wounded animals and fallen soldiers who were indeed

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