Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Life and Works:

He was born in St. Louis (Missuri), in 1888 and educated at Harvard. He was an American by birth, but his cultural background was at first English and then European. Infact in 1910 he went to Paris and at the Sorbonne, after attend in the Oxford University. He settled in England during World War I and worked in London, first as a bank clerk, then as a publisher. His first important poem, The love songs of j. Alfred Prufrock, appeared in 1915. His first book of criticism was published in 1920 and The Waste Land two years later, after the American poet Ezra Pound had contributed to reduce it to its final form, and Eliot later dedicated it to Pound himself, "il miglior fabbro- the better craftsman". In 1925 was published The Hollow Men and two years later Journey of the Magi. In 1927 he renounced his American citizenship and became a British subject. In the 30s attempted to revive verse drama, the most successful of his plays, Murder in the Cathedral about the assassination of Becket in 1770, was published in 1935. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in London in 1965.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a long poem in 443 lines, and five section:

The Burial of the Dead;

A Game of Chess;

The Fire Sermon;

Death by Water;

What the Thunder said.

It is considered the greatest poem of the twenty century. When it appeared produced a sense of shock, a feeling that the poetic tradition was being upturned. There was the matter of its difficulty; there were those who found it totally obscure, and others who found it arid and desiccated, as some people found mr. Eliot himself.

Eliot was one of the modernist English poets of the first half of 20^th century. He explained his modernism:" Our civilisation comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must became more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning".

For the ordinary reader this meant considerable obscurity; and it had the effect of turning poetry from something everyone could enjoy into a pursuit for an academic elite". 

The Waste Land defies any order or unity. It is an amazing anthology of indeterminate states of the mind, of impressions, situations and personalities. All the fragmentary passages seem to belong to one voice relating to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time. The fragmentary nature of the poem stays for the fragmentary nature of the world, of the society, of the human mind, after the first world war, that, caused the defacement, not only about the material level: buildings which must been reconstructed, but about the morale level too, in fact the atrocity of the war had devastated the human consciences. So, Eliot, expressing this formal shattering underlines the presence of the single parts, evidencing, as in a puzzle, their appurtenance at a pre-existence picture that can bee, in a different way, recollected. This different recollection can bee get whit the use of the so called "mythical method". Eliot speaks in one of his essays: Ulysses, Order and Myth about this method affirming that:" It is a simply way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history".   So, in the author's opinion, Joyce whit the Novel "Ulysses" was the first to use this innovative method, getting thanks the new theories introduced by psychology and anthropology. Joyce in his work speaks about a normal day life of a normal man, reading it in a unusual way, in fact he makes a perpetual parallelism with the Odyssey, to enlarge by resemblance and difference the actions and the characters, who are common people, give them another dimension and to express the universal in the particular.

So, according to me, the mythical method responds to the necessity of interpreter the world, the life, it gives man a way to read it, because, the modalities used before aren't sufficient now. In fact the past is the only certain thing, it represents a productive and mythical time in that the man was harmoniously united with nature.

For that Eliot gives more importance to the past, that appears in the poem as mythical, by references and quotations from many literary works belonging to different tradition and cultures. So, in a cyclical view, history is for him the repetition of the same events, and of the" classicism", that is the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present.

In this view also the poetic culture is a living unity, in the sense that Eliot thinks that the passed literatures, also if they are of different nationality, constituent something of unitary, the cultural background of every man, the common roots, for that gives certain.

However the cooperation between the mythical past and the desolated and infertile present is ever present in His works.

Style:

The style of the poem is fragmentary because of the mixture of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the ode, the quatrain, to reproducing the chaos of present civilisation. So the single fragment aren't separated, but unit between them, so that the effect is those that can be found in the cubist picture.

Present are metaphors and symbols, that contributed at the difficulty of the poem, so that the reader must partake in an active way to the compression.

Present are the analogies, the juxtapositions, the repetition too.

Besides Eliot uses the so called "objective correlative", that is the intention of the poet of give life to impersonal and objective poems, starting from the idea that " The poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality. The emotion of art is impersonal" [ . ] " The man who suffers must bee separated to the mind which creates".

So the objective correlative is a way to objectify the feelings, the emotions, with the use of external elements. That is functionally to have a rational comprenction of the world, because this technique involves a removal from the same world, there ins't involvement.

In the work there is the juxtaposition of segments from past and present. On the literal level the poem covers about a 20hauar period on a single day. But in the extract Eliot disregards the gap between . Past and present can have a simultaneous existence only in the mind , so there isn't a chronological adamant, but one interior one. the result is a continuous ation between past and present, for example between Dante's time and his view of mankind and the values of the present society.

Interpretation:

The poem is difficult. In Eliot's lifetime it was interpreted as a comment on the futility of civilisation after the first world war and on the emptiness and confusion of contemporary life. After his dead with the publication of letters and biographies, it became clear that it was as much a personal as a public "wasteland". It reflected his search for religious truth and the unhappiness of his first marriage.

Bibliography:

"The modern world. The great writers", Bradbury; casa editrice Penguin book, edizione 1988.

"Opere" T. S. Eliot a cura di Roberto Sanesi, classici Bompani, edizione 2001.

"Poesia straniera", a cura di Antonella Francini, La biblioteca di repubblica, edizione 2004.

"Lit & Lab", Spiazzi, Tavella, Zanichelli, 2004.

"Words that speak", De Luca, Ellis, Pace, Ranzoli, Loecher,2006.

"El. English in literature", Ansaldo, casa ed. Petrini, 2006