04 TS Eliot general notes and overview

T.
S Eliot
Formative Years and experiences
• On Sept. 26, 1888, T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Mo., a member of
the third generation of a New England family that had come to St.
Louis in 1834. In 1907 he was completing a Bachelor of arts degree
was hard on the track of a new poetic voice. In 1908 he discovered
Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and through
it the French poet Jules Laforgue. From the example of Laforgue,
other French symbolists, and late Elizabethan dramatists, he began to
develop the offhand eloquence, the pastiches and discordant juxta-
positions, the rhythmic versatility, and the concern masked by evasive
irony and wit that would soon dominate the American-British
renascence in poetry.
• When World War I broke out, he transferred to Merton College,
Oxford, and studied with a disciple of F. H. Bradley, who became the
subject of Eliot's dissertation. Ezra Pound, the young American poet,
discovered Eliot at Oxford. Though they were quite different, they
shared a devotion to learning and poetry. After Oxford, Eliot decided
to stay in England and in 1915 married a vivacious Englishwoman,
Vivienne Haigh Haigh-Wood.
‘Preludes’
Preludes
• 'Preludes' is a chain of four short poems composed by T. S. Eliot
between 1910 and 1911. It was published in his first collection,
Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. t is in turns literal and
impressionistic, exploring the sordid and solitary existences of the
spiritually moiled as they play out against the backdrop of the drab
modern city. ‘Prelude’s may appear to be imagistic representations of
urban life, recorded without comment, but it could be argued that the
objectivity and detachment are illusory. It is difficult to separate the
objects of perception from the perceiving consciousness.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• Early Poetry
• When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eliot tried to
join the U.S. Navy but was rejected for physical reasons. That year his
first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared and
almost immediately became the focus for discussion and controversy.
Eliot's abruptly varied rhythms and his mixtures of precision and
discontinuity, contemporary references and echoes of the past, and
immediate experience and haunting leitmotifs spoke to the
distraction and alienation that World War I had intensified in Western
civilization.
• This quality was most effective in the ironically titled poem "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which the Victorian dramatic
monologue is turned inward and wedded to witty disillusion and
psychic privacies to present a dilettante character fearful of disturbing
or being disturbed by anything in the universe. Prufrock moves
through a dehumanized city of dispirited common men on an empty
round of elegant but uncommunicative chitchat. The many voices
within him, speaking in approximations of blank verse and in catchy
couplets, contribute to what Hugh Kenner, the American critic, called
an "eloquence of inadequacy."
‘The Hollow Men’
The Hollow Men
• He ended his preoccupation with one kind of alienation in "The Hollow
Men" (1925), where the will-less subjects of the poem cluster in a dead
land, waiting like effigies for a galvanic revelation that does not come.
They comment on their lot in a chorus that includes a children's game
song, a fragment of the Lord's Prayer, a parody of "world without end"
and other expressions from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.
• "The Hollow Men," "Gerontion," and The Waste Land compose a
triptych that delineates the estrangement of the self in a society fallen
into secularism, with the central panel, The Waste Land, suggesting the
possibility of salvaging the self by reconstituting culture out of its
scattered parts.
The Symbolist Movement
Symbolist Movement and T. S Eliot
• The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, and
with additional material in 1919, is a work by Arthur Symons largely
credited with bringing French Symbolism to the attention of Anglo-
American literary circles. Its first two editions were vital influences on
W. B. Yeats and T. S. assuring its historical place with the most
important early Modernist criticism. Symbolist artists sought to
express individual emotional experience through the subtle and
suggestive use of highly symbolized language.
• The Symbolists wished to liberate poetry from its expository functions
and its formalized oratory in order to describe instead the fleeting,
immediate sensations of man’s inner life and experience. They
attempted to evoke the ineffable intuitions and sense impressions of
man’s inner life and to communicate the underlying mystery of
existence through a free and highly personal use of metaphors and
images that, though lacking in precise meaning, would nevertheless
convey the state of the poet’s mind and hint at the “dark and
confused unity” of an inexpressible reality.
• The Symbolist movement in poetry reached its peak around 1890 and
began to enter a precipitous decline in popularity about 1900. The
atmospheric, unfocused imagery of Symbolist poetry eventually came to be
seen as overrefined and affected, and the term décadent, which the
Symbolists had once proudly flaunted, became with others a term of
derision denoting mere fin-de-siècle preciosity. Symbolist works had a
strong and lasting influence on much British and American literature in the
20th century, however. Their experimental techniques greatly enriched the
technical repertoire of modern poetry, and Symbolist theories bore fruit
both in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliotand in the modern novel as
represented by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, in which word harmonies
and patterns of images often take preeminence over the narrative.
T. S. Eliot and Imagism
• Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and omas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) were
not only poetic contemporaries but also friends and collaborators.
Pound was the instigator of modernism’s rst literary movement,
Imagism, which centred on the idea of the one-image poem. A bene t
of Pound’s theoretically divisive Imagist movement was that it
prepared literary society to welcome the work of later modernist
poets such as Eliot, who regularly used Imagist techniques such as
concise composition, parataxis and musical rhythms to make his
poetry, speci cally ‘ e Waste Land’ (1922), decidedly ‘modern’.
Famous Imagist Poem:
• In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.
—Ezra Pound (1913)

• Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth
century. A reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian
poetry, imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and
precision through the use of exacting visual images. As opposed to
the allegorical meaning of images in Symbolism, images in Imagism
were literal: they described objects as exactly as possible. Any
figurative or symbolic meaning arose from the juxtaposition of these
concrete images with each other, or by the metaphoric application of
the image to a situation. Pound's famous (and famously brief) "In a
Station of the Metro" is an example.
• The metaphoric or symbolic force of the poem arises simply from the
juxtaposition of the "faces in the crowd" with the "petals" on the
branch described with great economy and precision. The Imagists
emphasized such precise economy of technique. Unlike the dreamy
allegories of the Symbolists, Imagists focused on describing real
objects with fidelity and inventiveness, focusing on well-chosen,
superbly evocative details.
Modernism
Modernism and Poetry
• Modernism
• A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of
movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its
most radical peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the
philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed
the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For
artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the
assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors.
• Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as
the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of
language and its claims on coherence. Ezra Pound vowed to “make it
new” and “break the pentameter,” while T.S. Eliot wrote
The Waste Land in the shadow of World War I. Shortly after The
Waste Land was published in 1922, it became the archetypical
Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed
registers and languages.
T.S Eliot and Modernism
• For many readers, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) is synonymous with
modernism. Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism:
its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience;
its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and
discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning.

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T.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

—Ezra Pound (1913)

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