More handpicked essays just for you.
Industrial revolution introduction
The eassay about industrial revolution
The eassay about industrial revolution
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Life in modern society was endured rather than lived. The lives of individuals in modern society were bound by routine, lacking originality and meaning, which saw them to turn to spiritually and emotionally corruptive influences in order to withstand the endless and morbid cycle of home and work which was their lives. This is the vision of life in modern society created by TS Eliot in his work ‘Preludes’. Modernism was characterised by the growth of capitalism and consumerism, as spurred on by the industrial revolution, intermingled with the shock and devastation of WW1. The emphasis of material gain over originality, the sacrifice of meaning to the pursuit of commodities, as well as the subversion of gender roles, with women replacing absent soldiers in the workforce, such betrayals of tradition influenced anglophile TS Eliot, through foreboding imagery and the fragmented style of his work, to challenge the deterioration of society at the hands of modernism. Through the unnamed and somewhat distant persona of ‘Preludes’ Eliot applies a torturous fate to all members of modern society, reflecting Eliot’s resolute conclusion that no substantial achievements could be made in a society that lacked traditional modes of art, politics, economics or religion.
TS Eliot’s early works are renowned for their nihilistic motivations and reflect complete distaste and contempt for modernist society, being ‘driven by scepticism’ according to B Rajan. Eliot’s poems such as ‘Preludes’ (1917), ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1915), “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (1915) and ‘The Wasteland’ (1922) are all similarly themed on the doomed fate and torturous meaninglessness of early 20th century American society. Eliot’s co...
... middle of paper ...
...the growth of society despite advances in technology and science is being stunted by a lack of imagination and originality. The stationary nature of society draws readers into an inescapable cycle of work and home, misery and despair. That no hint to alleviation is given fully reveals the need for escapism which generated corruption within society. When coupled with the aforementioned recurring images of desolation, which connote persistent poverty despite the labours of individuals, an understanding in the minds of readers that life was a matter of endurance rather than achievement resonates. The quest for meaning can then be safely concluded as unobtainable and a true failure. The ideas created through the representation and implications of time tie together the elements of Eliot’s vision of life in modern society as being hapless, pointless and lacking substance.
History has seen advancements in technology, philosophy, and industry, all of which radically changed the lives of those witnessing such developments. Slower, more relaxed lifestyles have given way to lifestyles of a faster paced nature. George Eliot describes her preference for the leisure of the past, conveying the message that the rushed leisure of her time is hardly leisure at all. She accomplishes this by using several stylistic devices, including personification, imagery, and diction.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was perhaps one of the most critical writers in the English language’s history. Youngest of seven children and born to the owner of a Brick Company, he wasn’t exactly bathed in poverty at all. Once he graduated from Harvard, he went on to found the Unitarian church of St. Luis. Soon after, Eliot became more serious about literature. As previously stated, his literature works were possibly some of the most famous in history. Dr. Tim McGee of Worland High School said that he would be the richest writer in history if he was still alive, and I have no choice but to believe him. In the past week many of his works have been observed in my English literature class. Of Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poems Preludes, The Journey of the Magi, The Hollow Men, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, I personally find his poem The Hollow men to be the most relatable because of its musical allusions, use of inclusive language, and his opinion on society.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, literature changed and focused on breaking away from the typical and predicate patterns of normal literature. Poets at this time took full advantage and stretched the idea of the mind’s conscience on how the world, mind, and language interact and contradict. Many authors, such as Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Twain, used the pain and anguish in first hand experiences to create and depict a new type of literature, modernism. In this time era, literature and art became a larger part of society and impacted more American lives than ever before. During the American modernism period of literature, authors, artists, and poets strived to create pieces of literature and art that challenged American traditions and tried to reinvent it, used new ways of communication, such as the telephone and cinema, to demonstrate the new modern social norms, and express the pain and suffering of the First World War.
...s, Colleen. The love song of T.S. Eliot: elegiac homoeroticism in the early poetry. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot. Ed. Cassandra Laity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. p. 20
Many people in the world who are unhappy with their lives can connect with the emptiness the hollow men feel in Eliot’s poem. “We are the stuffed men leaning together headpiece filled with straw” indicates an unoriginal quality that all the men share. Their goals in life are alike because they are not fulfilling. In “The Hollow Men,” the image of scarecrows represent people’s empty lives and their vacant pursuits. The hollow men’s lives have no point or meaning.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
...In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images God gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, diligent reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope.
T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but
This novel was written in the Victorian Era, a time when society faces many social difficulties such as industrialization, prostitu...
This essay aims to explore the contextual ideas behind the modern movement, how it influenced today’s artists and thinkers, and how ‘Modernization, Modernity, Modernism’ shaped the world we live in. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, around 1860 after man had considerably conquered the machine, a new reality became prevalent in the lives of the newly industrialised world. Modernism includes more than just art and literature. By now it includes almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture”(Greenberg 1982:5). This quote can be applied to the earlier days of modernism when jobs had changed from agricultural based employment to corporate and menial based labour.
This poem is considered to be “one of the most difficult poems in a difficult literary period”. The Wasteland is a poem that is said to be one of his most influential works. At first glance, critics considered the poem to be too modern, but then opinions changed as they realized the poem reflected Eliot’s disillusionment with the moral decay of World War I in Europe. T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland combines theme, style, and symbolism to explore life and death. The Wasteland was written in 1922 and is a long poem divided into five sections.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
T.S Eliot, widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern poetry, has written many great poems. Among the most well known of these are “The Waste Land, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which share similar messages, but are also quite different. In both poems, Eliot uses various poetic techniques to convey themes of repression, alienation, and a general breakdown in western society. Some of the best techniques to examine are ones such as theme, structure, imagery and language, which all figure prominently in his poetry. These techniques in particular are used by Eliot to both enhance and support the purpose of his poems.
...required a reinvention of poetics and the very use and meaning of language. Since the modern period is said to extend to this day (it's debated whether it's post-modern or not, since both elements survive), any final say on the matter is difficult. What can be said is that Eliot's poetry, as misinterpreted, misread, and misunderstood as it may be, is a quintessential cornerstone in modernist thought, a fragment in the puzzle, which may yield an emergent whole, though it may not be fully grasped.
George Eliot provides a valuable look into the lives of historically unremarkable and ordinary people in her novel Middlemarch. This insight allows the reader to discover the established society within 19th century Provincial England, and how that society shapes a relationship with the individual. Eliot uses Middlemarch and its disdain for the tropes of conventional romance to embody unimportant people –rather than magnificent journeys, struggles, and victories of princes and kings – whom are affected by the social web in which they inhabit and interact with each other. This human social web is the main focus of the novel, and, therefore, a world in which characters are free to imagine themselves free from social pressures, such as marriage idealism, that determine their lives is created.