Pees a 8 Authors and texts y i Thomas Stearns Eliot 1868-1965 c 7 — oy Throws Sprazes, cavelle , , . Only Couvect... Nes Diae chon. ¢ ~v0(“3 © xusctrgdes ) Life and works encouraging the work of young poets such Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, as Ezra Pound (@ 10.8) and W.H. Auden ‘Missouri, in 1888, into a family of English ( 10.15). Throughout this time Vivien descent and was educated at Harvard. was in poor health and Eliot was under ‘Though an American by birth, hiscultural considerable emotional strain. He spent background was at first English and then _ some time in a Swiss sanatorium, in European. In fact he discovered John. Lausanne, undergoing psychological Donne and the English Metaphysical poets treatment and here he finished The Waste (@ 45); he learned Italian by studying Land: poetry was, in fact, his only refuge Dante, to whom he devoted one of his. where he expressed all his horror at his most celebrated essays in 1929, Here Eliot unhappy home life. This long poem was stated that Dante was the poet who best __ published in 1922 after Ezra Pound had expressed a universal situation and praised contributed to reducing it to its final form, him for his “clear visual images’, ‘the_ and Eliot later dedicated it to Pound lucidity’ of his style and “his extraordinary himself, “il miglior fabbro — the better force of compression’, to come to the craftsman —", a quotation from Dante's conclusion that “more can be learned Purgatory. In 1925 he published The about how to write poetry from Dante Hollow Men, a poem written as a sequel to than from any English poet”. = ‘The Waste Land’s philosophical despair, In 1910 he first went to Europe and even where the seeds of his future faith studied in Paris at the Sorbonne where he may be found. attended Henri Bergson’s lectures, and ‘In 1927 he became a British citizen and where he started to read the works of the defined himself as “classicist in literature, French Symbolists. Later he came back to _ monarchist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in Harvard and he took a degree in religion” In the same year he joined the ided philosophy. ‘Church of England finding the answer to guider At the outbreak of the First World War _ his own questionings and to his despair of Study hesettled in London, where he a modern world lacking faith and religion. published essays on philosophy, taught for a while and started to work asa clerk in Lloyd's Bank. In 1915 he married the Brit His religious poetry bloomed in Ash- Wednesday (1930), purgatorial poem, in Four Quartets (1935-42), and two | ish important plays, Murder in the Cathedral 4. Answer these questions about T. S. Eliot’s work. 1, Where wasT.S. Blot 2 Gene a hisworks ballet dancer Vivien Hai (1935) on the assassination of Thomas influenced by? ‘Wood, despite his parents’ Becket, and Family Reunion (1939) on the siete worries about her mental guilt and expiation of a man haunted by him in the 19208 SS SoS ‘After the collection of poems Eliot finally decided to separate from 4, Why did he convert to ‘Anglicanism? | Prufrock and Other Observations | 5, Howes is rebus (1917), which had made him an important avant-garde poet, he- edited The Criterion (1922), his wife, who was committed to a merital asylum, where she died nine yearstaterin 1947. Her death, however, created a experience reflected in 7 pees terrible sense of guilt within the soul of nis works? oe ice an innovative intellectual the poet and unhappiness moved him to ; ; rmagazine of European literature, write in a letter: “I have always known, eee and, in 1925, he became a hell ones’. 5 director for the publishers Faber and Faber, publishing all his writings through them and isin mybones”. ~ Tn the 1930s and 1940s, Eliot’ essays ‘became more concerned with the ethical and philosophical problems of modern 7. What role ofthe artist dic he present in his critical essays?Wednesday (1929), Four Quartets ATS. Elliot, (1935-42), Murder in the Cathedral (1933) and Family Reunion (1939). ® ‘The impersonality of the artist oe society. His growing social concerns led him also towards the theatre and he ‘became one of the chief exponents of poetic drama. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Londow and, according to his own instructions, his ashes were interred in the church of St. Michael's in East Coker. A commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph, taken from Four Quartets: “In my. beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning” The conversion His work can be divided into two periods: before and after the conversion to Anglicanism. + The works ofthe first period are characterised by a pessimistic vision of the world, without any hope, faith, ideals or values, a nightmarish land where spiritual aridity and lack of love have deprived life of all meaning. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925) belong to this p + Purification, hope and joy are the ke ras of the WOTKS.of the second period: ‘The Journey of the Magi (1927), Ash Eliot was also an influential literary critic: his critical essays orrauthors, both ancient and modern, as well as on the theory of poetry. and on the foundations of literary criticism are both numerous and of primary importance. Most of them are collected in such well-known books as. The Sacred Wood (1920), Selected Essays (1951), The Three Voices of Poetry (1953) and On Poetry and Poets (1957). In these essays he concentrated on specific problems of style and technique: he shared with Joyce that it was important for the artist to be impersonal and to separate “the man who suffers” from the “dre hind which creates”. In the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent from The Sacred Wood Eliot declared: —*The poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is | onlya medium and nota personality,in | \ which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. | The emotion of art is impersonal. And the | yoet cannot reach this impersonality vithout surrendering himself wholly to the | Lworkto be done” Thus the characters of his first works | are archetypes of the 20th-century human beings who turn their own subjective experience into universal form with which | anyone can idemtify. | | 2 F53The Modern Age F54 Authors and texts The sections The Waste Land escapes any order or unity. It is an amazing anthology of indeterminate states of mind, of impressions, hallucinations, situations and personalities. All the fragmentary passages seem-to belong to one voice relating to a ‘multiple personality beyond the limits of space.and time. He is Tiresias (© t140), the Theban prophet from Sophocle’s plays who experienced blindness and the life. of ee ae cee ‘women he observes. He is the knight from the Grail legend; he moves through London sok pod ere eet eg been deprived of its spiritual roots. ‘The poem consists of five sections: “The Burial of the Dead’, which centres on the basic opposition between sterility and fertility, life and death; “A Game of Chess", which juxtaposes the present squalor to a past ambiguous 1, guided splendour; study IIL The Bite Samoa’ where the = sce 2) tifeme of present alienation is 1. Answer tho following rendered through the {questions about The Waste Land. 1 description of a loveless, mechanical, squalid sexual encounter; “Death br Water which reinforces the idea of a spiritual shipwreck; which evolees religions from East and West: a possible How many sections are there in The Woste Land? What do they deal with? What isthe main theme of the whole poem? What concept of W. Heidt ama solution is found in a sort of presented? sympathy with other human beings; however, such a solution does not modify the general atmosphere of utter ‘What is the mythical method employed by Eliot in this poem? arak What innovative =e techniques characterise The main theme the style ofthis poern? a All these fragmentary parts have one main theme running through them: the contrast {[between the fertility of a Can you explain what the objective correlative is ae The Waste Land 1982 decay of western civilization caused by ‘World War I and by those forces operating under the name of modernity. The new concept of history ‘The mythical past appears in the references to.and quotations from many litera works belonging to different traditions and cultures, and religious texts, like the Bible and Hindu sacred works. This use of quotations reflects the concept Eliot had of tradition and history, that is, the repetition of the same events, and of ‘classicism’, that is, the ability to see the past asa concrete premise for the present and ‘the poetic culture’ as a ‘living unity’ of all the poems written in different periods. In the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, already quoted, Eliot pointed our: “Tradition involves the historical sense (..] which involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but ofits ; presence; the historical sense compels a ; ‘man not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the schole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the tradition of his own country, has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’. Thus present and ast exist simultaneously in The Waste Land, just as they do in the mind, and the continuous shifts of time and space (@ #139) are caused by the free associations of ideas and thoughts, as in Ulysses by James Joyce (@ #165). ‘The mythical method In his evaluation of western culture, Eliot ‘went back to its origins, when legends and myths were syniptoms of spiritual attitudes which he regarded as extremely important. In modern society, however, ‘old myths are present, but they have lost_ poortheir deep meaning and have been betrayed; itis especially mythical allusions that the contrast between present and past appears. Eliot contrasts the ‘meaninglessness of modern life with allusion to the Arthurian legend Quest for the Holy Grail, a metaphor for ‘man’s search for spiritual salvation. He also. ‘makes references to the May festivitie celebrating the rebirth of nature, and the Celtic myth of the Fisher King, awaiting a hero to break the curse of impotence put upon his kingdom. In the essay Ulysses; Onder and Myth (1923) Eliot explained the mythical method, which Joyce also ‘employed in Ulysses: “Itis simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.[...] Psychology, ethnology, and The Golden Bough (written | by James Frazer in 1890) have concurred [f0 make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of the narrative | method, we may now use the mythical | method”. Innovative stylistic devices The style of The Waste Land is fragmentary because of the mixture of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the ode, thé quatrain, the free verse (© Poetry 6), thus reproducing the chaos of present civilisation. The most effective analogies can be found in some cubist images or in some apparently unconnected cinematic shots used to express a certain emotional state: the meaning is not in the single fragment but in the whole. Eliot requires the active participation of the reader/ public, who experiences the same world as that of the speaker/poet, by employing the technique of implication. jor and symbol replace direct statement; to this purpose, Eliot adopted the of the which he explained in an essay on Hamler sand his problems (1919): “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by Demoislles Avignon, finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion _is immediately evoked”, Therefore if Writers or poets or playwrights want to create an emotional reaction in the audience, they must find a combination of images, objects, or description evoking that appropriate emotion. The source of the emotional réaction isn’t in one particular object, a particular image, or one particular word. Instead, the emotion | originates in the combination of thesé ijsceneee when teranoet iariies For example in t140 the objective correlative of the squalid, passionless present age is the banal and loveless scerie of seduction of a typist by her lover. From the French Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, Eliot derived the technique of juxtaposition; squalid elementeare— juxtaposed with poetic ones, trivial flernents with sublime ones, Another device widely used by Eliot is the repetition of words, images and phrases from page to page: they all give ‘he impression ofthe increasing musicality | of the poem,L The Modern Age. ae Fa setoto, Engh The Waste Land (mc Hame” ~ el. a Romance. He also comes the influence efeet: book, The Golden Bough, inga response, and ‘manifestations of this response in various episodes ©” The Grail legend, to which Eliot refers tlis about a land which is barren because its King — the Fishe: King— has been wounded by a spear thrust through his thighs, and sexually maimed. A young and pire night goes in quest of the Holy Grail — the cup which had been use ¢o collect the Bdood fai Vie bods ¥ Christ—and reaches a Chapel where the Grails kept, Only ifthis knight asks the meant of the lance that he sees during a procession will the Ring be healed, and the land ‘Miss Weston found close correspondence between the Grail legend and the ancient symbol of fr tility rite. The Fisher King appears to be the mediaeval version of the pre-Christian young men or youriz gods slain or drowned in the springtime and then symbolically revived. The fertility of the land was as- sociated with their youth and strength (see also the myths of Adonis, Atti, Osiris). In this perspective Eliot inserted the description ofthis own waste land. The Waste Land consists of five parts of different length: I. The Burial of the Dead. It begins challenging the traditional attitude to seasons: spring is not welcome, because it awakes memory and desire, while inter 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. IA Game of Chess. Its main theme is the emptiness of modern life, which suggests lack of love, sterility, deceit M1. The Fire Sermon. This part develops the theme of lust: even love is meaningless, because it does not bring life but is just sexual urge. IV. Death by Water. This is the shortest part (10 tines only), and is about the body of a drowned sailor decomposing in the se. JBmE P Bruegel. The Tiumoh of Death, 1562 preentreThomas Stearns Eliot | 2 V. What the Thunder Said. Here we find all the main themes that have appeared in the pievious sections. After hinting at the death of Choistit presents a journey through the desert to an empty chapel. The voice ofthe thunder echoes in the distance From the very beginning of The Waste Land it is possible to note the presence of quotations, references to myths, legends, etc., and a very special use of language. Words have reverberations, reso- nances, that render them highly connotative and create several levels of interpretation. Tacs vier Sho, urate de ope 1908 This section shows the essential emptiness, the anxiety and lack of control which dominate the lives of modern people. The ttle, A Game of Chess, comes from a play written by Thomas Middleton in 1624, The following scene is set in a lady's private sitting room. A visitor arrives, and these lines con- lain the dialogue between the lads and her visitor. tZexta y nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 1. This fine contains a refer Speak to me. Why do vou never speak? Speak. fence to The White Devi What are you thinking off? What thinking? What? Ee eps , never know whatyon are thinking, Think’. eee : (Cate 16d) tts pl : 5 Ithink we are in rats’ alley ‘a geageceer oaks: “Wink om thinke on?” and the othe: Where the dead men lost their bones. replies: Nothing, ofmohing : ivoridta ams esses 2TWislne slo contain are : The wind under the door? coroee 00 8 ear Price. : “Whats that nofse now? What is the wind doing?” ine a character aks“ Is © 10 Nothing again nothing. {he wind in that door ell? : ‘Do Stns tne echoes Shake : You know nothing? Do you sce nothing? Do you remember Sao Nothing?” 20d magia raeormatos : Fl fathom fe ater i . (Of histone cole ae 3 Iremember “ Thar am os tht wees | 15. Those are pearls that were his eyes*. ‘Are you alive, or not? : But s there nothing in your head:‘Thomas Stearns Eliot I Pee Focus on ines 25-28, The future actions ofthe two people reveal unawareness and carelessness about what happens in the world 1 trivial repetitiveness of everyday actions expectation of an event which will break the monotony of a dissolute fife 1 impossibitity to have peace 1D boredom endless waiting ror something other: Tick as many as you consider suitable; add others if you wish. 7 Consider the stylistic Features of these lines and find examples for each of the following: layout Ee oe ‘This passage reflects the use of “free verse”. What features apply to this definition? > The Waste Land The ttle of part Ul recalls Bud- prophet of Greek mythology. Ac- knew that the pestilence had falt- ha's Fire Sermon - which has cording to Ovid's Metarnor- en on Thebes because Oedipus an important correspondence to phoses, one day he saw the had unknowingly killed his oz Christ's Sermon on the Mount. "coupling of snakes and killed the father and married his own The Buddha states that the hu- female; asa result, hewas turned mother, but declined to tell. In the ‘man senses are burning with the into a woman. After seven years Odyssey he was in the “House of fire of lust, of anger, of infatua- he saw another couple of snakes, Hades”, the abode of the dead, tion, and sets the tone for the killed the maleand returned tobe and though a dead himself, he ‘main themes of the section. aman, He was blinded by Juno could see the future of the living, The episode here presented for stating that women derive and predicted Ulysses’ death by deals with a typist who has sex “more pleasure from love than water with her lover.The scene is de- men, but Jove gave him the gift of sovibed by Tiresias, a famous prophecy. In Oedipus Rex he‘The Modern Age. ‘Then read the following paragraph which comments on the meaning of these juxtapositions, and fill in the blanks. - The sailor who to the peace of the home 2 the “!2}...n..ours-ne ROU is Contrasted vith af Bho worker who returns to her !4) . untidy one-room flat at “teatime”. Olivas (51 in Goldsmith's novel is contrasted with the typists [6] acceptance Of a SexUa! Fe1BtION [7] .nnmenseneFESPRCt OF love. These juxtaposition (8)... che squalor, non-communication and [9 of ideats typical of made times: the 10} of the characters is [1 1}... and automatic. deprived of feeling, and | 12) a sense of the impoverishment and degradation of the 113) sno WON. This is how the poem ends The protagonist's journey east- der, which are the cure for the make up contemporary con- ward leads him to Chapel Per- meaningless life of the inhabi- sciousness, a Message will come ilous, which suggests the Chapel tants of the Waste Land: Datta from primordial wisdom; deep in- of the Grail legend and indicates (give), Dayadlwam (be compas- side our modern wasteland there ‘the mystical initiation into spiri- sionate), Damyata (restrain isa sense of continuity with what tual knowledge, end continues io yourselves). These hveewords are as gone before; it is through the Ganges River. This sacred from anUpanishad, or Sanskrit myth that the present and the past ‘iver, which recalls the wisdom of philosophical treatise can be united, and the “heap of Hindu sages, in a far tradition If the modern quester has the broken images” can acquire a suas the home of earth based, veg desire, the curiosity to know the meaning and be alive. ‘tation myths. The quester hears meaning of the fragments and the three commands of the thun- broken images that appear ta Critical notes An American by birth and a cosmopolitan by vocation and by education, Eliot possessed a wide and deep knowledge of the masterpieces of world literature. He acknowledged a special debtto Dante, hom he considered a model for his own poeuy. What he admired in the Italian poetwas iy t0 express a wide emotional experience anid, at the same time, the restraint, the per fect balance between the personal and the impersonal. If Dante was to him “the Poet” par excellence, Eliot also acknowledged other ini the Metaphysical poets, notably John Donne, for the blend of emotion and thought, immedia- cyand technical control: the Symbolists, and Baudelaire in particular with his vision of the sor- id aspects of the modern metropolis and his capacity to place side by side the squalid and the visionary, the prosaic and che fantastic; the Imagist mavement, for the use of clear and precise images, for the concision in language and the freedom in versification. Ezra Pound played a very important role for Eliot: he constantiy helped and encouraged him, revised The Waste Land before publication, and advised Etiot to tighten his poem removing several explanatory and descriptive parts.Thomas Stearns Eliot The Waste Land, dedicated to Ezra Pound, “i miglior fabbro”. isa typical ex- ample of Modernist art, and as sch is very difficult wo define. It isniota narrative poem, nor dramatic, nor lyric. Based on various legends. it portrays modern Lon- don.as.a sterile, waste land, and expresses the depression and cynicism of the | postwar period. The poem is built around several symbols, the mostimportantof ‘which are drought and flood, representing death and rebirth. The main difficulty for the reader is to work outa meaiiing: there seems to be no beginning and no end; thoughts appear unfinished; there are abrupt, shifts; he characters are not clearly defined and the events cannot be located in ‘xparticular place; the past merges with the present, while fragmentation and jux- taposition challenge a logical evolution. The impression one receives s that of a_ heap of broken images", that the poet puts together using a criterion similar to the cinema technique of montage. Gradually, the reader is impressed by certain repetitions, allusions, and simi larities, which help him detect certain themes and motifs. For example, the theme ofinability to communicate. of sterility lack of ove, and corruption. The people of Waste Land do i6t talk to one another: ther recite monologues; sexual relation- ships are either a manifestation of lust and violence, or mechanical and boring. The barren land which must be restored to fertility, ie. saved, is the human heart, full of selfishness and lust: the search for the Grails the search for wuth. Itisalso possible to discern the motif of pilgrimage and of quest following the course ofthe ‘Thames asit flows through London; the Thamesis first associated with the Rhine, the great river of German mythology, and finally the journey through the Waste Land concludes with powerful allusions tothe Ganges, the sacred river of India, thus uniting Western and Eastern cultures. “Like the rest of Elior’s early works, The Waste Land presents affinities with other important works of Modernism: the structure which breaks awav with the canons of traditional poetry re- minds one of jovce’s bold experimentation in novelwriting, of Picasso in painting and Stravin- sky in music; the sense of emptiness, corruption, lack of communication, meaninglessness of life, sa feature common to all Modernist writers and artists, from Joyce to Yeats, from Pound to Apollinaire, from Kafka to Conrad, from Mann to Proust, and the list continues... ‘One of the most impressive features of The Waste Landis the wish to highlight the wisdom and spirinuality ofthe past dhrough the parallel with the spiritual emptiness ofthe present, he dry and barren waste land. To conves this parallel Eliot uses the so-called “mythical method”, so brilliantly employed by Joyce in Cihsses, in the idea that modern life can be more deeply inter- preted and receive significance ifitis presented parallel to equivalent models of behaviour from the mythical past. fm This explains the use of juxtaposition, the numerous allusions and quotations from other works, and the reference to ancient myths, which arc so typical of The Waste Land. An example ‘of juxtaposition of images of past splendour with images conveying modern squalor and cor- ruption comes from the different wars in which Eliot describes the Thames in Part 3. When he refers to the Thames of today he says: “The river sweats Oiland tar” Butafier a few lines there comes the reference to the past: “Elizabeth and Leicester Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell its Red and gold” 1 -Dante, Purgatory: SXV1 referring to the Provencal poet Arnaut Ds T S, Eliot by Patrick Heron, 1949The juxtaposition of the beautiful image of 16% century London, where the Thames savv the splendour of the royal barge carrying the ‘Queen and the Ear! of Leicester, makes the vision of the squalor and dirtof the same river in modern times more poignant. The Waste Land shows bold experimentation not only in the structure but also in the eclectic quality of the style. Eliot uses differ- entverse forms; there is no consistent metre running through the po- em, and the length of the lines varies. Some lines have rhyme and others do not, and there are parts where the stress pattern is reminis- cent of Shakespearian blank verse. In addition, it must be noted that punctuation marks are not used in the conventional way. In the episode concerning the typist rhyme exists in most of the lines, even. ifitdoes not respect rigid scheme; some of the rhymes join words in. such a way that they mock the actions: “one bold stare” ~ “tnillioi aire”, “defence” — “indifference”, “alone” ~ “gramophone”. A Derain, Pont sur la Tamise ‘The language presents great variety of tone, from solemn ang 1905 biblical to Isrically intense, from colloquial and common wo highly re- fined and poetic. No mood or tone prevails for long, but abrupt shifts bring total and sudden changes. ‘A phrase often associated with Eliot is “objective correlative”. Itwas coined by Eliot hime iW éxterior object or “a chain of events” will sBBest: ; more effectively than the description of the emo- the squalid objects and mechanical actions in the episode of the typist are the objective correla- tive of the lack of love, the apathy and spiritual death of modern times, ~ Another feature of The Waste Land that impresses the reader is the number of allusions and from other poets, some of which in a foreign language. And if this last fact empha- sizes the characters’ inabiliry to communicate because they cannot understand what is being said io them, italso contributes to make hisverse difficult tread. Butitisalso true that the quo- tations and allusions have great evocative power, and add a further dimension to the poem. Po- etry does not have to be understood to convey its message: it can be enjoyed wit understanding oft, in the same way as music, or art, does not have to be translated into words. ‘The effect of great poetry — and of great art in general —is mysteriously powerful. s type B cM what you have learnt Written examination ‘Answer the following questions in a few lines. +. Why can Eliot be defined a “citizen of the world”? 2 What literary genres does his work cover? What are the most important works in each Field? 3 What influences can be detected behind The Waste Land? What features of Modernism emerge from The Waste Land? Can you describe an example of juxtaposition in the poem? What is the mythical method? Why is The Waste Land so difficult to read? What are the principal themes and motifs of The Waste Land? Which of them emerge from the passages that you have read? ewan