Modernism - T. S. Eliot

T. S.
Eliot
(1888–1965)
General presentation of his influences, works and views
• poet, critic, playwright, spokesman of the postwar generation

• born in the United States; after graduating from Harvard University, he studied at Sorbonne
University in Paris. He settled down in the United Kingdom and became a British citizen.
• his master: Ezra Pound, founder of the Imagist Movement
• the Imagist Movement: a transatlantic movement in the 1920s started by T. E. Hulme and
Ezra Pound, with the aim of restoring the art of writing. According to Imagism, the aim of
poetry is to create powerful images. An Imagist poem is short, objective, direct, straight, with
no excessive use of adjectives, characterized by the juxtaposition of images, concentration,
understatement. Representatives: Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle. Influences:
Greek and Latin epigrammatic poetry; Japanese haiku (a short poem which consists of 17
syllables: 5-7-5, snapshot of an image, a striking image), Chinese poetry, medieval
ideograms, French Symbolism. Pound’s definition of an image: the image presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. The artist’s role is to create a
concrete, palpable image; “less is more” (Ezra Pound).
Des Imagistes: Anthology published in 1914 – https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50782/50782-
h/50782-h.htm. This volume laid down the fundamental rules of Imagism:
1. Direct treatment of the subject;
2. Avoidance of any word that does not contribute to the creation of the image
(condensation, economy of words);
3. Avoidance of any set of rhythmic or rhyming scheme.
In a Station of the Metro

by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these
faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Analysis:
- the most famous Imagist poem
- haiku: a short poem of 5-7-5 syllables
- isolation of a singular image without a context
- conceit: faces – petals; crowd – bough
- focus on the effect that the image creates
- contrasts: city vs nature; individual vs crowd; mechanical environment (metro) vs nature
(bough);
- predominance of nouns, lack of verbs
- “apparition” – a sense of dynamism, creation of a momentary impression
- contemplation, the point of view of an observer
- the image creates a new perspective
- appeal to the senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch
• T. S. Eliot’s poetry was influenced by:

- Imagism (Ezra Pound)
- Metaphysical Poetry (John Donne)
- French Symbolism (Charles Baudelaire)
• Poetic themes:
- decay of culture in the modern Western world
- alienation, crisis of civilization
- search for spiritual peace
• Major poems:
- The Waste Land
- Ash Wednesday
- Journey of the Magi
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
• Literary criticism:
- founder of New Criticism - New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary
theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th
century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of
literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.
- revaluation of tradition – essay entitled Tradition and Individual Talent – “the past
should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”: the
literary tradition can be altered by rereading and reinterpretation; theory of
impersonality: the main aim of poetry is the creation of images rather than the
expression of emotions – the poet must strive for the extinction of his personality. The
voices of personae in poetry instead of an intimate, personal, lyrical tone.
- shift of canon: from Milton to Donne; from Tennyson to G. M. Hopkins – contribution
to the rewriting of English literary history
• Plays: Murder in the Cathedral – about the murder of Thomas Becket, archbishop of
Canterbury
• 1948 – Nobel Prize for Literature: the poet of the modern symbolist-metaphysical tradition
Conclusions: T. S. Eliot was an erudite poet with a vast knowledge of the literary tradition,
who pursued an unconventional, intellectual poetry, highly individual in tone.
The Waste Land

(1922)
- T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece
- A collage of texts
- A series of scenes and images with no authorial voice intervening to give instructions to
the readers – the author is present through the personae of his invented characters)
- Revaluation of the Western literary tradition: allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, pre-
Socratic philosophers, 17th century poets and playwrights, works of anthropology,
history, philosophy (not necessarily the central works but what formed part of the poet’s
private readings)
- The reader needs editorial assistance in recognizing and understanding many of the
allusions. (It was Pound who revised T.S. Eliot’s manuscript, which was complemented
with footnotes. Eliot dedicated this quintessentially modernist poem to Pound, famously
calling him il miglior fabbro (the better maker) in gracious acknowledgment.) The
ignorant reader can also get the “feel” of the poem through the images.
- Poetic method: intertextuality
- Intertextuality – “A term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 to denote the interdependence
of literary texts, the interdependence of any one literary text with all those that have
gone before it. Her contention was that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but
is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the ‘absorption and
transformation of another’.” (J. A. Cuddon: Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary
Theory) Forms of intertextuality: overt/covert quotation, misquotation, allusion,
paraphrase, translation, plagiarism.
- A great number of quoted and embedded texts – the question arises: who writes The
Waste Land? “I am never sure that I can call my verse my own” (T. S. Eliot) – The
lyrical I becomes a problem also thematically (impersonality)
- The coherence of The Waste Land is provided by the speaking voices (personae), the
recurrent symbols and archetypes.
- THEMES:
o a poem about spiritual dryness, about the kind of existence in which no
regenerating belief gives value to people’s daily activities;
o barrenness, decay, death without resurrection
o failure of modern civilization (moral decay, social emptiness)
o expression of disillusionment of the postwar generation
o impossibility of communication
o a study of civilization doomed by its own sterility
o collapse of confidence in moral values
o immense panorama of futility
o a poem of many voices from the past and the present coming together
o the central figure is Teiresias (prophet, androgyn; the myth of Teiresias: Tiresias,
a blind prophet, appears in many Greek myths. Several tales account for his
blindness. One tells that he was struck blind as a boy when he saw Athena
bathing. Later Athena felt sorry for Tiresias but could not restore his sight.
Instead, she gave him the gift of prophecy and the ability to understand the
language of the birds. In another myth, Tiresias came across two snakes mating.
He killed the female snake and was transformed into a woman. Seven years later,
he again saw two mating snakes; this time he killed the male snake and became a
man. Because he had been both man and woman, Zeus and Hera asked him to
settle an argument: Which of the sexes enjoys love more? When Tiresias replied
that man gives more pleasure than he receives, Hera struck him blind. To make
up for this deed, Zeus gave Tiresias the ability to foresee the future and allowed
him to live an extraordinarily long life.)
o it is not always clear who speaks; fragmentedness
- METHOD: The mythical method
o allusions to several myths (religious mix, both Oriental and Western): Attis,
Osiris, Adonis, Aeneid, the Grail legend, the Upanishads
o myths of fertility: Eliot gives the clue to the theme and structure of the poem by
making reference to Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend, entitled
From Ritual to Romance (1920). Weston relates ancient vegetation myths and
fertility ceremonies to medieval rituals and Christianity (the legend of the Holy
Grail). She found an archetypal fertility myth in the story of the Fisher King
whose impotence brought drought and desolation to the land. This symbolic
Waste Land can be revived only if a questing knight goes to Chapel Perilous and
asks some ritual questions about the Grail and the Lance (originally fertility
symbols). The proper asking of these questions revives the king and restores the
fertility of the land. The relationship of this original Grail myth to fertility cults
and rituals can be found in many different civilizations – stories of a dying God
who is later resurrected. Fisher King: symbol of Christ
o symbolic picture of a modern “Waste Land”, need – and impossibility – of
regeneration, redemption
o modern life: emptiness and alienation
- STRUCTURE: five parts:
o The Burial of the Dead
o The Game of Chess
o The Fire Sermon
o Death by Water
o What the Thunder Said
The Waste Land
BY T. S. ELIOT
FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
T. S. Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were
suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance
(Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of
the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of
the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work
of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I
mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who
is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to
vegetation ceremonies.
I. Burial of the Dead
20. Cf. Ezekiel II, i.
23. Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v.
31. V. Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5-8.
42. [V. Tristan und Isolde,] III, verse 24.
46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have
obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional
pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of
Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to
Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the “crowds of
people,” and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic
member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.
60. Cf. Baudelaire
“Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
“Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.”
63. Cf. Inferno III, 55-57:
“si lunga tratta
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.”
64. Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27:
“Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto ma' che de sospiri,
che l'aura eterna facevan tremare.”
68. A phenomenon which I have often noticed.

74. Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil.
76. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.
Questions:
1. What is the effect of intertextuality in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land? What kind of
attitude does it require on the part of the reader?
2. In what way is The Waste Land a poem of disillusion? What view of the modern
world does T. S. Eliot express in this poem?
3. What is the significance of the title?
4. What is innovative about The Waste Land? What is the text’s relationship with
literary and cultural tradition?

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T. S.

General presentation of his influences, works and views

• poet, critic, playwright, spokesman of the postwar generation

In a Station of the Metro

• T. S. Eliot’s poetry was influenced by:

The Waste Land

April is the cruellest month, breeding

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

T. S. Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land

68. A phenomenon which I have often noticed.

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