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In "Teaching World War I Poetry-Comparatively," Margot Norris connects Charles Sorley's poem "When you see millions of the mouthless dead" to an uncanny phenomenon in World War I poetry: "Sorley's poem is one of a number of poems that invoke the figure of mouthlessness, or the broken mouth or broken teeth, as a trope for the difficulty or inability of soldiers to articulate their experiences" (144-5). Amid the first industrial war, whose novel horrors include tanks, airplanes, machine guns, and poison gas, soldiers could not color their traditional lexicon, a vocabulary born of Victorian ideals, to paint this war's grim visage, and this insight is familiar to World War I poetry criticism; in fact, Paul Fussell, author of the seminal book The Great War and Modern Memory, writes, "One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available-or thought appropriate-to describe them. To put it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress" (169). This phenomenon might seem specific to war poets, but the inability to express the atrocity of the Great War is widespread-despite writers, especially T. S. Eliot, distancing themselves from the World War I poetry tradition. Although T.S. Eliot, like other Modernist poets, does not recognize the work of certain World War I writers as poetry, The Waste Land suffers from the same affliction as the war poets: neither Eliot nor the war poets could voice their reaction to the Great War; more specifically, The Waste Land and trench poetry struggle with the ineffability of the age through fragmentary language and images of broken mouths. While "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" contains examples of ineffability, such as the questions "Do I dare?" and "And how should I begin?" this essay will examine The Waste Land exclusively (Eliot 4 and 5). Regardless of Eliot's dedication of Prufrock and Other Observations to Jean Verdenal, a friend who died on the battlefield, The Waste Land is nonetheless his response to the Great War, hence the title, a reference to No Man's Land, the torn landscape between the trenches. For comparison, this essay will review the poetry of the trench poets,...