I would like to focus my paper on the figure of Thomas Stearns Eliot, one of the greatest poets of the 20 th Century. T.S Eliot is one of the central figures of Modernism in Britain . His works along with those from Pound and Yeats produced a revolution in English poetic theory and practise.
Modernism is the period that comes just after the Victorian Period, between 1901-1945. Modernism is well-known because it involves a radical break with some of the traditions of the Western culture and thoughts. This radical breakthrough is caused as a consequence of certain historical events. One of these is the World War I which was one of the causes that brought a feeling of desillusion among the society and obviously among the artists of that time.
T.S Eliot used the image of the waste land to describe this feeling in his famous poem The Waste Land , published in 1922. We can find examples of this in the third part of the poem called The Fire Sermon in which Eliot describes the waste land as he perceives it: cold, dry, barren and covered with garbage. Tjis feeling of anxiety will be also rendered in the last part of the poem called What the Thunder Said as read in lines 2-3: After the frosty silence in the gardens/ After the agony in stony places and He who was living is now dead/ We who were living are now dying (lines 7-8). This mood will continue thereafter until the verse 358
First of all , I would like to say that Modernnist poetry in genereal and T.S Eliot's poetry in particular is difficult and complex with many differences between the authors as the individualism and the identity was the main characteristic among them. Otherwise, and because of this common claim, they build up some common traits. Eliot will be the host of most of them.
To begin with, the fact of using free verse is one of the characteristics of Modernist Poetry as we can observe all along Eliot's work.
The use of works of the past is another feature which characterizes Modernist Poetry and Eliot makes use of lots of literary allusions from the past such as epigraphs from other more ancient works. As instances of that I wanted to refer to his poem The Waste Land , which starts with an epigraph taken from The Satyricon of Petronius or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) which starts with an epigraph taken from Dante's Inferno . Eliot's poems were very influenced by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri as we can realise because of the wide use of quotations in his poem The Waste Land as in lines 63-64: I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled . Eliot's poetry also makes reference to some Shakespearean plays such as Hamlet or The Tempest and to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (line 431: Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe ) just to mention some writers Eliot quoted in his poems.
The Waste Land or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock poems by T.S Eliot
Inferno by Dante Alighieri, iii 55-57 and iv 25-27 in www.readprint.com/chapter-158/Dante-Alighieri
The next aspect I would like to consider is the use of myths in Modernist Poetry. Eliot, as one of the major exponents of Modernist poetry, also alludes to myths in his poetry. As an example of this I would like to mention what Grover Smith said about it: In The Waste Land ' he imposed the fertility myth upon the world about him . We can find another example at the beginning of his poem The Waste Land . In the epigraph that Eliot took from The Satyricon of Petronious he makes allusion to Cumaean Sibyl who was the most famous of the Sibyls, the prophetic old women of Greek mythology
I also would like to mention that the style that Eliot uses in his poetry is very peculiar because he makes use of several lines which are written in different foreign languages. Again we could take as an example his poem The Waste Land in which Eliot uses German in lines 31-34: Frisch weht der WindDer heimat zu/ Mein Irisch kind / Wo weilest du , French in line 202: Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! or Italian in line 427-428: Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina/ Quando fiam uti chelidon . This peculiarity could be related to Eliot's pleasure to make constant references to works from other authors.
The usage of symbolism is also very important in Eliot's poetry. In his poem The Waste Land water is an important symbol which gets the classical meaning for the cycle of life. Water kills and means death but it also gives life and fertility as in line 335: If there were water we should stop and drink , this sentence could be associated with the idea of renewal and regeneration.
In order to conclude with my essay, I would like to give my personal point of view about Eliot. I think Eliot is quite difficult to understand, furthermore his work contains lots of erudite allusions and I consider that you need to be a very cultivated person to be able to find and understand such classical inter-texts or those charges of meaning. Some of them belong to important writers along the history of literature (Dante, Shakespeare or Ovid among others) but even if you know about them or you have read some of their works, it is difficult to match the allusion made by Eliot with the writer or the play that it belongs. I have been able to identify some of them as it is the case of the quotation that Eliot makes in The Waste Land (line 172) of Ophelia's last words in Hamlet : Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night , because I was lucky to had finished the reading of the play a month ago.
From T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning . Copyright © 1956 by The University of Chicago Press.
Note from: http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/
See Hamlet, act iv, scene v, by Shakespeare