THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

Life

He acquired British citizenship. He was very appreciable.

The conversion

His production can be divided into two periods: before and after the conversion to Anglicanism. But it is not only a religious conversion, he changed his vision of life:

Þ    he saw at first life as empty, which cannot give anything to man (it is a negative vision), he gave an image of emptiness, sterility. He talked about alienation, which means detachment or isolation from other people. [The Waste Land, 1922]

Þ    Then, after his religious conversion he expressed his new/positive vision of life: his hope for new values. What was in common with people was the lack of communication. He expressed his hope for a better life for a search of new values.

Critical essays

Eliot was very influential both as a poet and as a critic.

According to Eliot, who shared with Joyce the same view, poetry has to be impersonal and objective and must separate 'the man who suffers' from the ' the mind which creates'. This was Eliot's situation: he suffered with his life, he separated his private life from his job

The poetry arouses from personal experience which is expressed in impersonal way.

The characters

They represent the 20^th-century ordinary man. They are not specific.

THE WASTE LAND

What does waste mean?

It means sprecare, perdere, abandoned, without inhabitants/people, without vegetation, trees, life, with no water, a land which is not cultivated; that is why we may think of a desert.

Waste could also mean rubbish.

According to Eliot the waste land is a land inhabitant, as London, full of people, crowded with people, but anyway this place has the same feature of  a real waste land/of a real desert. So his world is characterised by aridity, monotony

London

This vision of life is pessimistic but also realistic, with a bit of exaggerations (the extreme situation is no real).

The Waste Land express how Eliot considered London, it is a typical example of modernist art. We cannot define this poem but we can define it in a negative way: it is not lyrical, not romantic, not narrative. In fact it seems a sequence of broken images, of flashes where past and present are mixed up.

London is the present, past is composed of/connected with:

He is influenced by Frazer (the author of The Golden Bough) and by the writer who wrote about The Grail Legend (a lots of writer wrote about the Grail legend, also French authors).

The rites are pre-christians and according to primitive people young Gods died in spring time and later they where revived. In The Waste Land there is a mention of an old practice, according to which imagines of Gods, for instance little statues, were buried and it was thought that they could bring fertility.

So there was a sequence of death and fertility that means new life.

The Grail was the cup of the Last Supper which Christ used. According to the legend the cup was kept in the Holy Chapel which was placed in the Grail Kingdom. The king of the Grail Kingdom was the Fisher King who was made sterile by a spear (lancia), so even his land was sterile. His land could restore fertility only if a pure kinght went to the Holy Chapel.

The meaning of this legend in that: first we have sterility then fertility and salvation.

Christ died and then resurrected.

Death and rebirth: This is the unify point of the fertility rites, the Grail legend, Christ.

Eliot used the three passage/transformations to stress that in the past there was always the passage from spiritual death to renewal.

According to Eliot in the post-war period there was a condition of spiritual death/sterility but the tragedy is that there is no passage to the spiritual renewal (we are stopped in the first phase).