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    Eliot

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    Gianluca Franchi
    T.S. Eliot was an American-born British poet, playwright, and literary critic. He is known for works like The Waste Land and The Hollow Men which expressed a pessimistic vision of the modern world following World War I. His first work used fragmented styles and allusions to past myths and legends to contrast the meaningless modern life with past eras. Eliot later converted to Anglicanism and expressed more hopeful themes while focusing on style and technique in his critical essays. Though his early marriage brought emotional strain, his works became influential in shaping 20th century literature.

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    Eliot

    Uploaded by

    Gianluca Franchi
    30 views2 pages
    T.S. Eliot was an American-born British poet, playwright, and literary critic. He is known for works like The Waste Land and The Hollow Men which expressed a pessimistic vision of the modern world following World War I. His first work used fragmented styles and allusions to past myths and legends to contrast the meaningless modern life with past eras. Eliot later converted to Anglicanism and expressed more hopeful themes while focusing on style and technique in his critical essays. Though his early marriage brought emotional strain, his works became influential in shaping 20th century literature.

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    T.S. Eliot was an American-born British poet, playwright, and literary critic. He is known for works like The Waste Land and The Hollow Men which expressed a pessimistic vision of the modern world following World War I. His first work used fragmented styles and allusions to past myths and legends to contrast the meaningless modern life with past eras. Eliot later converted to Anglicanism and expressed more hopeful themes while focusing on style and technique in his critical essays. Though his early marriage brought emotional strain, his works became influential in shaping 20th century literature.

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    30 views2 pages

    Eliot

    Uploaded by

    Gianluca Franchi
    T.S. Eliot was an American-born British poet, playwright, and literary critic. He is known for works like The Waste Land and The Hollow Men which expressed a pessimistic vision of the modern world following World War I. His first work used fragmented styles and allusions to past myths and legends to contrast the meaningless modern life with past eras. Eliot later converted to Anglicanism and expressed more hopeful themes while focusing on style and technique in his critical essays. Though his early marriage brought emotional strain, his works became influential in shaping 20th century literature.

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    Eliot

    Biography
    Born in 1888 in Missouri, Eliot was educated at Harvard. Had a both English and European
    background. He studied Dante and learned Italian, and praised him because he is the poet who
    best expressed a universal situation. In France he read Bergson and Symbolists in 1910. During
    WWI he settled in London were he wrote philosophical essays. He married a dancer named Vivien,
    who suffered of several diseases, which put Eliot under emotional strain. All this feelings are
    expressed in The Waste Land, a poetic masterpiece published in 1922 that was his only refuge
    through which he expressed all of his unhappiness and horror. In 1925 he then published The
    Hollow Men, a sequel to TWL’s philosophical despair.
    In 1927 he became British and a classicist and joined the Church of England which was the answer
    to a world lacking faith and religion. Several years later he separated from his wife, who died later
    in 1947. This created a terrible sense of guilt in Eliot and unhappiness. In 30s and 40s his social
    concerns grew and became more interest in theatre becoming one of the exponents of poetic
    drama. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in London in 1965.

    The Conversion
    Two periods:

     First period: Pessimistic vision of the world; no hope, faith, ideals or values.
     Second period: Purification, hope and joy are key-words.

    The impersonality of the artist


    He wrote various critical essays about literature where he concentrated on style and technique: he
    shared Joyce’s impersonality of the artist, who had to separate “the man who suffers” and “the
    mind who creates”. Thus characters of his first works are archetypes of the 20 th-century man, who
    turned their individual experience into a universally relatable one.

    The Waste Land


    The sections There’s no order or unity. It is an anthology of impressions, states of mind,
    situations. It appears to be one “voice” which relates to multiple personalities, breaking any space-
    time rule. The “voice” is Tiresias, the Theban prophet from Sophocles’ plays who experienced
    blindness and both sexes. He is the knight from the Grail legend, moving through London and a
    post-war Middle Europe. Five Sections:

     The Burial of the Dead, the opposition between life and death.
     A Game of Chess, present squalor against past splendor.
     The Fire Sermon, squalid sex which represent present alienation.
     Death by Water, spiritual shipwreck.
     What the Thunder said, religions evoked from East and West, leading to a solution in
    sympathy with other human which doesn’t change the atmosphere of desolation.
    Main Theme
    It is the contrast between past fertility and present spiritual sterility and chaos of the world. The
    fragmentation represents decay of western civilization caused by WWI and Modernity.

    The new concept of history


    The mythical past appears in classic literature and religious texts, like Bible. He used many quotes,
    suggesting he thought history was the repetition of same events, and classicism as a concrete
    premise of present. Past and Present exist simultaneously in The Waste Lad and in the mind, and
    the shifts between time and space are cause by the free associations of ideas, as in Joyce’s Ulysses.

    The mythical method


    In past western culture myths and legends were really important, but in present days they lost
    most of its importance. But it is through mythical allusions that the contrast between past and
    present appears. Elliot contrasts the meaningless modern life with things like the Arthurian
    legend. The method is explained in Ulysses, Order and Myth: It is a way of giving a significance to
    futility and anarchy.

    Innovative stylistic devices


    Fragmentary because of mixture of poetic styles: free verse, blank verse, etc… to reproduce
    present chaos. With the technique of implication the reader experiences the same world of the
    poet. The technique of the objective correlative replaces direct statements, “a set of object which
    shall be the formula of that particular emotion”. The emotion originates in the combination of
    those object only when they appear together. He learned the technique of juxtaposition from
    French Symbolist “squalid elements opposed with poetic ones”. He also used the repetition of
    several elements through pages to give the poem musicality.

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