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Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
the modernist poet
The Road to Success
Life
- He was born on 26 September 1888 in Missouri.
- He studied at Harvard, then at Sorbonne and in the end achieved a doctorate in Harvard.
- 1914 he moved to England.
- 1927 became an Anglican and British citizen.
- He awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1948.
- Eliot died on 4 January 1965.
Literary Influences
Ezra Pound and the French Symbolism
Eliot got influenced by the Imagist Writers. The elements of their art are:
- simple and concise style.
- free common metrical form
- avoid vagueness
- give importance to symbols and images.
The leader of this movement was Ezra Pound, he will be a strong presence in his life and will help him to get published.
Eliot was also impressed by the French Symbolist Writers and the Metaphisical Poets. From here he took the ability to combine intellectualism and sensuous language.
Works
WORKS
Eliot was a poet, a playwright and a critic.
During his life he wrote a series of important poetical works and 7 plays.
The themes that he dealt with changed from the beginning of his career to the conversion to Anglicanism, that became an important turning point in his works.
A quote from "The Little Gidding", the last of Eliot's Four Quarters
First Period
Before the conversion
This First Period is characterised by:
- Pessimism
- Nightmarish land where life has no meaning
- Lack of all positive emotions (faith, hope, love) and values
- Spiritual aridity
- Psychological fragility caused by the WW1
Some of the works of this period are:
- Prufrock and Other Observation (1917)
- The Waste Land (1922)
- The Hollow Men (1925)
Second Period
After the conversion
The Second Period, after the conversion to Anglicanism, is characterised by:
- Purification, hope and joy
- Art and spirituality
- The language uses the musicality of the words' sound
Some of the poetical works of this period are:
- Ash Wednesday (1930)
- Four Quarters (1943)
- Murder in the Cathedral (1935 - play)
- The Family Reunion (1939 - play)
THE STRUCTURE OF THE POEM
Modernist poem
The "Waste Land" is composed of five parts:
"The Waste
Land"
- 1° "The Burial of Dead"-> series of juxtapositions
- 2° "A Game of Chess"-> sterility of modern life vs splendor of the past
- 3° "The Fire Sermon"-> theme of love
- 4° "Death by Water"-> drowned sailor and modern sterility
- 5° "What the Thunder Said"-> spiritual journey of humanity
What makes "The waste land" a modernist poem?
- rejection of any kind of narrative structure, order or unity (structural fragmentation)
- rich presence of quotes from ancient and classical sources (Dante, Shakespeare, Bible)
- constant use of juxtapositions (placing together two things in contrast with each other)
- blurred elements
- the style
- the objective correlative
Style
- It's fragmentary due to the mixture of different poetic style
- presence of high level of experimentation
- the language is particularly varied
- "the meaning is not in the single fragment but in the whole"
- it reproduces the chaos of modern civilization
The objective correlative
the "objective correlative" is a poetical concept elaborated by Eliot that he defined as:
<<a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion>>
In order for it to work he employs the technique of implication and he requires the active participation of the reader.
The general meaning of the poem
General Meaning
- Meaning of the title
- He doesn't use the traditional verse forms
- He uses different voices
- Eliot puts together different cultured allusions.
- He provides Footnotes
- The only hope
- Contrast between the fertility of the mythical past and the sterility of the modern world
- The fragmentation stands for the breakdown caused by the WWI and the modernity
What's the purpose of the myth?
Similar to the one that James Joyce had:
using the mythical method through mythical allusions, the antithesis between past and present appears.
Among them we find:
The role of myth
- the myth of the Holy Grail
- the Fisher King
- rites of fertility celebrated in ancient world
- others...
The Burial of the Dead
Unreal City
Continue
TIRESIAS
Tiresias was the blind prophet of Apollo, in Thebes.
In "The Metamorphoses" of Ovid there's a version of his story.
He turned into a woman for 7 years because he divided with his cane two serpents that where in the middle of a sexual act.
Then, for this double experience, was chosen from Zeus and Hera to give his opinion on which sex enjoys the most the sexual act. He said the woman (as stated Zeus) so Hera made him blind. Zeus couldn't stop the curse, so gave him the gift of foresight and a long life.