T.S. ELIOT 1888-1965 - The Waste Land

T.S. ELIOT 1888-l965

Harvard (M.A. degree), Paris (Symbolism), Germany (philosophy), Oxford & Cambridge (Ezra Pound, imagism). 1927: Religious conversion, conclusion of a long spiritual journey from the abyss of despair to the peace of faith.

Inferno

Prufrock and other observation (1917): the poem is a symbolic commentary on a world which has no beliefs, no illusions, no qualities.

Wasteland (1922): the beginning of modern poetry (unconscious, psychological aspects, free verse, quotations), the failure of modern man to find a reason or spirituality in life, complex association of images and characters (belonging to myth), picture about modern desolation, spiritual aridity of man without God, even the language shows the complexity of modern age.

The Hollow Man: a blind search for something that may fill the emptiness of modern life, very pessimistic.

Purgatorio

The Ariel Poems (1927-30), The journey of the Magi: the Magi represents the poet's state of mind just before the illumination of Faith had completed its action; the Ariel Poems express the poet's hope, the torment deriving from his limits will purify his soul.

Ash Wednesday (1930): the poem is about repentance and regeneration, trough the lines of this "religious poem" he realizes that suffering must be accepted with resignation because it is the way to salvation.

Paradiso

Four Quartets (1936-42): this collection is simply the conclusion of his journey from scepticism to regeneration and salvation. Themes: relationship between time and eternity, presence of God in human life. Each composition is named after a place for special significance for the poet, centred on a season. The poems are linked by their structure.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935): death of the archbishop Thomas Beckett, the religiosity is seen as the noblest form of life.

Themes: modern man's alienation from society (no spirituality), time versus eternity, the question of personal identity, the problem of faith in modern civilization, the sense that present is inferior to the past (past given by quotations), the fear of living, the moral, spiritual and sentimental emptiness of our time.

Features: poetry to express not the poet's own sentiments, but other people's feelings, he advocated the complete objective impersonality (Flaubert) of art against the romantic conception of poetic subjectivism; poetry must communicate something, even before being understood, first of all trough rhythm and musicality; to convey emotion without a direct statement but, indirectly, trough something suggesting one's own feeling (objective correlative = to communicate emotion, sensations not lyrically but by external images); importance of tradition since past and present co-exist in man, he wrote a sort of universal poetry, in which the individual poet is an active member of tradition, and tradition is continually enriched and transformed by each poet (use of universal symbols trough quotations); imagism; free verse; poetic aspects of the sordidness, ugliness and sterility of a modern metropolis (Baudelaire); images of everyday life, the poetic and the squalid; Paradoxes (Metaphysical poets), Dante (expressed everything in the way of emotion)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The love song (suggest something romantic, but missing) of J. A. Prufrock (ridiculous name, ordinary life) talks about the condition of failure and inertia of modern man. P. is unable to choose, there are many questions he ask himself without answer. Symbol of modern man who achieves nothing in life and has lost his identity. Structure: made up of quotations sentences, fragments, it has no logical development, no linear track, it flows with no purpose. Mixture of poetic and non-poetic images. First quotation from Inferno, as Guido wants to reveal his truth to humanity trough Dante, P. speaks directly to the readerhimself, both they share hell: real one and modern psychological one. P reveals urban degradation, the trivialization of art, the deep sense of inertia trough the ordinary routine activities and images, trough his personal decay (getting old without any decision) he express human spiritual decay, P. is not a hero, a prophet as Hamlet who faced the doubt and then decided for revenge, Real life destroys his inner illusions. Intertextuality: to pass trough past texts and take what the authors offer to make something original: Lazarus is used to reveal the mystery of the underworld, the fool to express the truth trough an apparently non-sense language, The mermaids to drive man to insanity and then to death.

The Waste Land

It marks the beginning of modern poetry. The most influential: no subjectivism, no introspection, no poetic images but free verse, impersonality and objective correlative. And the most influenced: quotations from literary, cultural, anthropological , religious sources, which are contained, translated and manipulated, into an original poetic text (Bible, Dante, Elizabethan and Jakobean drama, Metaphysical poetry, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Sanscrit texts), the importance of tradition: the poet is the link of the long chain of tradition.

Themes: contrast between the contemporary in his squalid aspects and the past, mythic or historical; emptiness and sterility of modern life, due to a lack of spirituality (the water): natural (desert), social (difficulty to communicate with each other (quotations from foreign languages makes the reading difficult, so Eliot provided the text with notes to explicate the meaning).

Structure: a sequence of images with no plot, sometimes ambiguous, apparently unconnected and open to various interpretations. Divided in 5 sections: The burial of the dead (dealing with the coming of a spring in a sterile land), A game of chess, The fire sermon (reinforcing the theme of squalor and introducing Tiresias, the blind spectator, whom Eliot himself considered the most important character in the poem), Death by water, What the thunder said. They all have the same vision of a nightmarish world inhabited by people that are spiritually dead, since their lack of faith has turned their lives into a sterile, arid waste land.

Features: the lack of explicit links between the episodes described, free verse, alternation of lyrical and narrative passages, quotation from 6 foreign languages, the need of a wide cultural background in the reader to understand the allusions, the religious symbolism, the stream of consciousness technique in interior monologues, specific references to places and times which are transformed into universal symbols.

Unreal City: Parody of love, the characters are a typist and a carbuncular young house agent's clerk. Tiresias is the symbol of the past in contrast to the degradation of the present. In the relationship there is no spiritual love, but a sense of indifference, of sterility and apathy, there are non romantic, grotesque description of the modern metropolis and of the two lovers.