Critical Essay | Critical Essay by M. E. Grenander and K. S. Narayana Rao

Critical Essay by M. E. Grenander and K. S. Narayana Rao

SOURCE: Grenander, M. E. and K. S. Narayana Rao. “The Waste Land and the Upanishads: What Does the Thunder Say?” Indian Literature 14, no. 1 (1971): 85-98.

In the following essay, Grenander and Rao trace Hindu thought as it was incorporated in portions of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Several years ago, in a report on a series of round table discussions by Indian and American thinkers, Richard McKeon included a passage which seems almost a gloss on the two last paragraphs of The Waste Land. Professor McKeon wrote:

The values to which art and religion give expression are universal, but the forms which those expressions take are particular and grow out of the circumstances in which art and religion develop. The authors of the Odyssey and the Ramayana found their materials in Greek and Hindu conditions of life, conceptions of values, and literary forms; yet one need not...
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