Faced with a world lacking variety, viewpoints, vibrancy, and virtue- a world without life- a fearful and insecure T.S. Eliot found himself the only one who realized all of civilization had been reduced to a single stereotype. Eliot (1888-1965) grew up as an outsider. Born with a double hernia, he was always distinguished from his peers, but translated his disability into a love of nature. He developed a respect for religion as well as an importance for the well-being of others from his grandfather at a young age, which reflected in his poetry later in life. After studying literature and philosophy at Harvard, Eliot took a trip to Paris, absorbing their vivid culture and art. After, he moved on to Oxford and married Vivien Haigh-Wood. Her compulsivity brought an immense amount of stress into his life, resulting in their abrupt separation. A series of writing-related jobs led Eliot to a career in banking and temporarily putting aside his poetry, but the publication of “The Waste Land” brought him a position at the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer. His next poem, called “The Hollow Men” reflected the same tone of desolation and grief as “The Waste Land.” Soon after, he made a momentous shift to Anglicanism that heavily influenced the rest of his work in a positive manner. Eliot went on to marry Valerie Fletcher, whom he was with until the end of his life, and win a Nobel Prize in literature. T.S. Eliot articulates his vast dissatisfaction with the intellectual desolation of society through narrators that share his firm cultural beliefs and quest to reinvigorate a barren civilization in order to overcome his own uncertainties and inspire a revolution of thought. In a society that he believes to be intellectually steril... ... middle of paper ... ...ake 116-117). He uses his struggle not only to reconstruct his own life but to return a sense of artfulness to the degenerated planet. T.S. Eliot distinguished what was incomplete about the aesthetics of society and overcame his introverted nature to bring the rest of the world to the realization of what needed to be changed in order to make their lives righteous. He uncovered that many individuals lose their true personalities to thoughts that they have to be a certain way or fit a certain stereotype. His work communicated that one cannot be completely free until they understand and believe in whatever their personal meaning of life is; Eliot found cultural diversity and truth to be of great importance. Eliot taught an important lesson that virtually anything can be accomplished and overcome with the right beliefs, perseverance, and determination to succeed.
I believe The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was a deep but pretty boring book. It was also thought provoking, but at the same time,this book made you think for yourself. I believe the end of the novel was the deepest part of the book, so I used that for the anchor text of the paper. I feel that these older books tend to be a bit deeper, but they often bore me, and I prefer to not read any more old books in the future.
Corso spent much of his early life between foster parents and prison, the latter being where he was introduced to poetry. Now credited as a key member of the “Beat Generation”, a group of poets who were opposed to social conformity and the traditional forms of poetry, Corso typically wrote poetry “on serious philosophical issues” (Olson 53). On the other hand, Eliot’s upbringing was more traditional, where he attended Harvard and went on to become a figure of immense influence in the literary world. Eliot’s first major poetic publication, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, bears many resemblances to Corso’s postmodern poem Marriage, a poem written to criticize the philosophical issues associated with marriage. To begin with, Corso’s Marriage opens with two rhetorical questions that the speaker attempts to answer throughout the course of the poem.
Because of Eliot’s economic status, he attended only the finest schools while growing up. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and Milton Academy in Massachusetts. In 1906, he started his freshman year at Harvard University studying philosophy and literature. He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy in only three years. Eliot went on to study at the University of Oxford and also at the Sorbonne in Paris. At the Sorbonne, he found inspiration from writers such as Dante and Shakespeare and also from ancient literature, modern philosophy and eastern mysticism. Eliot’s first poem he wrote was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915. Eliot converted his religion to Anglo - Catholicism and in 1927, his poetry took on new spiritual meaning. Ash Wednesday was the first poem he wrote after his conversion in 1930. It is said that it traces the pattern of Eliot’s spiritual progress. It strives to make connections between the earthly and the eternal, the word of man and the Word of God and the emphasis is on the struggle toward belief. Thus telling us that God is part of Eliot’s American dream.
Thus you can see how the Eliot reflects some of the major concerns of the context – modernism. The modernist movement broke away from the rules of romantic poetry in terms of structure. It also looked away from the beauty of nature and focused upon the “ugliness of urbanisation”, the power of the subconscious and the social issues such as women and the working class society. Eliot’s poems
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.
The Sleeper, by Edgar Allan Poe, was first published in the Poems of 1831; this poem has since been revised from its current version which was printed in 1845. This poem was written during the Romanticism Period. This time period is defined as a time in which poets began to “rebel against the Neoclassical restrictions and dominance of reason as poetic aim. Romantic poetry celebrated the imagination over rationality, passion, and dreams over reason and external reality, and isolated individuality over collective humankind. Romantic poetry looked to celebrate both the supernatural and elevate the commonplace.” (Henriksen) Poe’s imagination prevails in this lyric poem. The speaker of the poem experiences an internal conflict while mourning the death of a loved one.
In his poem, T.S. Eliot (often criticized for being too academic) packs a lot of information into a mere 98 lines. He uses complex allusions and extended metaphors to portray his feelings from 1925, and to reflect the feelings of the Hollow Men. The men who fought in World War One, and were abandoned into the desert of a society that did not care for
In conclusion, after exploring the theme of this poem and reading it for myself, Eliot has created this persona, in industrialised England or somewhere else. A man of low self-esteem, you embark on his journey as he struggles with a rational fear of being rejected by a woman.
Is modern life automated and devoid of purposeful existence? Does humanity suffer from a lack of vision and purpose in life? Can individuals in today’s contemporary society cope with the mediocrity, monotony and hollowness of their lives? Almost 100 years after first being published, T.S. Eliot’s poetry still resonates with us, due to his exploration of these timeless, universal and enduring questions that characterize the impotence of the modern individual. Responding to the aftermath of WW1 and the paradigm shift that resulted from rapid industrialization and urbanization, Eliot presents a panoramic perspective of the futility and chaos that characterized the post-war environment.
In The Metamorphosis, Kafka establishes, through his religious imagery and gospel-esque episodic narration, the character of Gregor Samsa simultaneously as a kind of inverse Messianic figure and a god-like artist, relating the two and thus turning the conventional concept of the literary hero on its ear. The structure of the novel reflects that of the Gospel of Mark in that it is narrated in individual events, and in this it is something of a Künstlerroman - that is, the real metamorphosis is over the course of the novel, rather than just at the beginning, and that change is a heightened sensitivity to the world in an artistic sense. The motif of change is a rather theological one as well: we see it in a religious sense, in the form of renewal and redemption, as Samsa is left a better, stronger and spiritually inhuman individual by his metamorphosis. What the reader knows of Samsa's life is very limited: only the last few months of his life are actually narrated, and even these are only revealed in vignettes. For this reason, the actual change in Gregor is subtle - much like that of Christ - and Gregor's status as the novel's hero is a humble one. His martyrdom for others creates in the reader an intense empathy for his plight, and elevates the physically weak, timid Samsa to the level of a demigod in the reader's eyes. Gregor's sacrifice and development of a newfound humanity even in his beastliness, coupled with the book's obscure, fractured style, detail the creation of at once an artistic visionary and a glorious Messiah, establishing Gregor as a Christ-like figure and the ultimate literary hero, one whose bodily weakness only strengthens his intellectual weight and the reader's adoration of him.
...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
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.
In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot develops his theme of sterility and decay in the post-World War I man by focusing on the aspect of "religious dearth or superficiality reflected in despintualized love" (Pinion). For Eliot, man's inability to find real love or to move beyond superficial sexual gratification is congruous to the spiritual decay of his soul.
Eliot is the world-renowned author of The Hollow Men. The Hollow Men is a poem that opens with the quote, “Mistah Kurtz--he dead,” which is the quote that opens up the novel Heart of Darkness. Furthermore, this poem is loosely based on Heart of darkness. The term “Hollow Men” refers to stuffed men, or men that show no love or emotion. Similarly, the European imperialists in Heart of Darkness, the American soldiers in Apocalypse Now, and the sinners rotting in the inferno are all hollow men. This poem is an autopsy of Western Culture that shows the unity of people having a shared hatred. John Henry Newman once quoted, “From shadows and symbols, into the truth,” which can correlate with the fact that we are born into society and into our families traditions and culture, but we live life to learn the truths of everything unless we grow up with the wrong state of mind. Moreover, if we have the wrong state of mind in life we will live in an endless cycle of unhappiness, and no emotion. This is why T.S. Eliot writes, “Life is very long,” in The Hollow Men. Life truly is very long, and it is full of opportunity and experiences that we must be fully aware of or else they were a waste. If we were to be the hollow men, the world world would have no meaning and our unhappiness would blind us from
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.