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T. S. Eliot<-drama<-chapter 8<-contents<-position

3. T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
Life

    Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England roots. Eliot largely abandoned his Mid-western roots and chose to ally himself with both New and old England throughout his life. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate in 1906, was accepted into the literary circles, and had a predilection for 16th- and the 17th-century poetry, the Italian Renaissance (particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest influence on him, however, were the 19th-century French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire. Eliot took from them their sensual yet precise attention to symbolic images, a feature that would be the hallmark of his brand of Modernism. He showed a great talent in literature and wrote one of his most famous poems of his age, “the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” (1917). Eliot also earned a master's degree from Harvard in 1910 before studying in Paris and Germany. He settled in England in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, studying at Oxford, teaching, and working at a bank. In 1915 he married British writer Vivienne Haigh-Wood (they would divorce in 1933), a woman prone to poor physical and mental health, and in November of 1921, Eliot had a nervous breakdown. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1927. Eliot's reputation was bolstered by the admiration and aid of esteemed contemporary poet Ezra Pound, the other tower of Modernist poetry. He died of emphysema at his home in London on January 4, 1965.

Major works
    Eliot’s influence upon poetry in the 20th century is undeniable. Through his essays, dramas, and especially his poetic practice, Eliot played a major role in establishing the modernist conception of poetry: learned, culturally allusive, ironic, impersonal perspectives in manner. He applied to symbols and elegant diction in his poem and also realized the technique in his drama, which is later called verse drama. His perfect imagination and creative practice in art won him unsurpassable celebrity.
     The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock talks about the solitary, fragmentary and alienating nature of modern urban existence: its emotional sterility, its inauthenticity and meaninglessness; the desire for solace in dreams and memories; masculine sexual ambition and fear, and Emotional and verbal inexpressiveness: the failure of communication and language, etc. The poem is accomplished in a dramatic monologue spoken by one character- the persona, Prufrock, which offers asides and soliloquies and contains an implied listener or auditor. As a poetic form, the dramatic monologue is primarily concerned with the construction of character rather than with the presentation of a story or actions. The form also characteristically combines sympathy for and judgment of the persona. The structure is Elliptical i.e. it proceeds by way of suggestion, implication, gaps and silences rather than through rational and logical connections between stanzas. This has the effect of making the reader work; the structure positions us to be active interpreters rather than merely passive consumers of the text. It also enacts the workings of the human psyche or consciousness, which moves rapidly and often at random from one subject to another, mixing memory, fantasy, desire, sensations. Poetic Techniques in the poem includes rhyme, rhythm, imagery, figures of speech: personification, metaphor and simile, as well as the aural dimension of language: assonance, consonance, alliteration etc.
    The Waste Land published in 1922, defined Modernist poetry and became possibly the most influential poem of the century. In such a fisher king story, a journeyer finds a wounded king in a barren and get the idea that the land would be sterile if the king would not be healed. So to heal the wounded king also means to heal the barren land. The journeyer, also the questioner, undergoes the hardships to search the way of healing the king. Symbolism is strong in this poem. Corrupted and discouraging modern society is revealed as the barren land. Emptiness and meaninglessness are leading factors of the world as depicted in the poem. A questioner is required to make the world rebirth. Devoid of a single speaker's voice, the poem ceaselessly shifts its tone and form, instead grafting together numerous allusive voices from Eliot's substantial poetic repertoire. The poem has five parts achieved by utilization of myth, literary allusion and religious symbolism. The first part, “The Burial of the Dead”, deals with amounts of broken images depicting lack of vitality. The second part, “The Game of Chess”, draws pictures of people in meaningless life and disloyal women. The third part, “The Fire Sermon”, presents ugly Thames by showing similar ugly world. The fourth part, “Death by Water”, has only ten lines mentioning the death of the Phoenician sailor that enhances the tragic color and power of death. The last part, “What the Thunder Said”, depicts a modern western world full of despair for lack of spiritual value and moral.
                      “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.”
                                                                        From the Burial of the Dead

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