Article: Chess is the game wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king: the metaphor of the game of chess in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.(Critical essay)

The metaphor of the game of chess, which T.S.Eliot crystallised in the final version of The Wasteland, functions as a structural node that coordinates the dynamics of meaning within the poem. By substituting the original title and subtitle of section II "He Do the Police in Different Voices (part II)" and "in the Cage" with "A Game of Chess" Eliot shifted the focus from a mode of inter-textual discourse to an intra-textual model of significance, given by the synchronic network of relations holding between the fragments in a de-centred literary circuit.

That T.S.Eliot was a keen chess player is in no doubt. Games of chess are documented as early as 1916 in a ...

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