Thomas

Stearns Eliot
POET ESSAYIST DRAMATIST

18881965

Life and works

Family background: Somerset ancestors. Puritan settlers. Cultural background: Harvard Sorbonne, Oxford, Henri Bergson, Jules Laforgue and French symbolists, Bertrand Russell, Ezra Pound in London (he praised his poem). 1917 He worked by Lloyds Bank. 1922 He published The Waste Land. Started to work as editor and director for a publishing firm. 1927 He became a British citizen. He joined the Church of England. 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. 1957 He got married with his secretary. He so on rejected the romantic conventions. He broke away from technique. He had a cosmopolitan culture. Sayings: American by birth and European by choice. Im an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics. At the same time the most modern and the most traditional, the most influential and the most influenced of poets. A poem should not mean, but be. all canons and evolved a new poetic

Themes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Modern mans alienation from society. Time versus eternity. The question of personal identity. The problem of faith in modern civilization. The sense that the present is inferior to the past. The fear of living. The moral, spiritual and sentimental emptiness of our time.

Features
1. Poetry is to be used only as an instrument to express not the poets own Emotional impact is sentiments, but other peoples feelings. He advocated the complete objective more important than impersonality of art against the romantic conception of poetic subjectivism. a message conveyed. This led him to avoid the use of the first person singular and to privilege dramatic monologues and dialogues or interior monologues. Poetry must communicate something first of all though its rhythm and musicality, even before being understood (objective correlative). He also advocated a kind of difficult and even obscure poetry. 2. He revaluated the importance of tradition since he said past and present coexist in man and the past is an active part of the present. A poet should turn to the past, outside his own country too, and write a sort of universal poetry. That is why Eliots poetry is so rich in universal symbols, in quotations from works of the European literary tradition and in references to ancient rituals, mythical events and religious allusions (all drawn from modern anthropological studies). 3. He avoided uselessly decorative rhetoric and replace it with clear, precise images, using the minimum number of words.

Literary influences
John Donne and the Metaphysicians influenced him with their use of wit, their striking association of images and the complexity of their poetry (French symbolists). Charles Baudelaire with his vision of the modern metropolis and his capacity to place side by side the squalid and the visionary, the prosaic and the fantastic. Dante Alighieri: use of allegory and the relationship between the medieval Inferno and the modern life. He had witnessed the disintegration of an age, the fall of the empire and he voiced the hope for salvation. In the Grail legend the medieval legend of the Holy Grail only a knight who was spiritually worthy would succeed in finding the Grail. Before doing so, he would be tested by nightmare visions and by the illusion of failure and emptiness.

The Waste Land

In his introductory note on The Waste Land, Eliot stated that the title, the plan and a large part of the symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Westons book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance. He also acknowledged the influence of another book The Golden Bough by James Frazer which deals with the development of magical, religious and scientific thought and gives vast information about ancient religious and magical practices. The Grail legend tells about a land which is barren because its king the Fisher King has been wounded by a spear thrust though his things and sexually maimed. A young and pure knight goes in quest of the Holy Grail the cup which had been used to collect the blood from the body of Christ and reaches a Chapel where the Grail is kept. Only if this knight asks the meaning of the Grail and of the lance that he sees during a procession will the king be healed and the land reclaimed to fertility.

Five parts
The Waste Land consist of five parts: 1. The Burial of the Dead It begins challenging the traditional attitude to seasons: spring is not welcome because it awakes memory and desire, while winter brings forgetful snow. This part deals with the opposites of life and death, fertility and sterility, hope and despair, which are the main concern of the poem. 2. A Game of Chess Its main theme is the emptiness of modern life, which suggest lack of love, sterility, deceit. 3. The Fire Sermon This part develops the theme of lust: even love is meaningless because it does not bring life, but just sexual urge. 4. Death by Water This is the shortest part (10 lines only) and is about the body of a drowned sailor decomposing in the sea. 5. What the Thunder Said Here we find all the main themes that have appeared in the previous section. After hinting at the death of Christ, it presents a journey through the desert to an empty Chapel. The voice of the thunder echoes in the desert.

Some comments
Like the rest of Eliots early works, The Waste Land presents affinities with other important works of Modernism: the structure which breaks away with the canons of traditional poetry reminds us of James Joyces experimentation in novels-writing, of Pablo Picasso in painting and Igor Stravinsky in music; the sense of emptiness, corruption, lack of communication, meaninglessness of life is a feature common to all modernists writers and artists, from Joyce to Yeats, from Pound to Apollinaire, from Kafka to Conrad, from Mann to Proust and so on. An example is provided by the comparison between the description of the Thames at the beginning of Conrads Heart of Darkness and in The Fire Sermon. Both writers stress the commercialization, the degradation of the Thames, which is no more the Thames of the age of Shakespeare. 2

A difficult poem
What makes it so difficult is: 1. The lack of an explicit link between the episode described. 2. The language used, made up of verse that often sounds like prose, where the occasional rhymes are sometimes imperfect and irregular and where lyrical passages alternate with others narrative, autobiographical, colloquial or ironic. 3. The presence of sentences and quotations from foreign languages. 4. The frequent allusions to people, traditions or events that require a wide cultural background in the reader. 5. The religious symbolism which is frequently hard to decipher. 6. The use of the stream of consciousness technique and interior monologue. The Waste Land is a typical example of modernist art, and as such very difficult to define. It is not a narrative poem, nor dramatic, nor lyric. The main difficulty for the reader is to work out a meaning: there seems to be no beginning and no end; thoughts appear unfinished; there are abrupt shifts; the characters are not clearly defined and the events cannot be located at a particular place; the past merges with the present. Gradually, the reader is impressed by certain repetitions, allusions, similarities, which help him detect certain themes and motifs.