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Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965). America and Europe. Born in St Louis, Missouri, into a family of English descent. He went to Harvard. He went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study the philosophy of Henri Bergson. He began to read the French Symbolists.

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Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

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  1. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

  2. America and Europe • Born in St Louis, Missouri, into a family of English descent. • He went to Harvard. • He went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study the philosophy of Henri Bergson. He began to read the French Symbolists. • He went to Germany. However, at the outbreak of World War I he went to Merton College, Oxford.

  3. The Meeting with Pound • 1915-1925 = very difficult years. • He worked in Lloyd’s bank in London. • He met Ezra Pound and managed to see his first major poems published •  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917). • He was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. • he went to a Sanatorium in Lausanne. • he finished the first draft of The Waste Land.

  4. From Nihilism to Faith • The Waste Land appeared in 1922 •  the leading modernist poet • The Hollow Men (1925) • The late 1920s and the 1930s were important years for • Eliot, who in religion found a way out of nihilism. • He converted to the Anglican Church in 1927. • The Journey of the Magi (1927) • Ash Wednesday (1930) • Murder in the Cathedral (1935) • Four Quartets (1943)

  5. Eliot’s Last Plays • After World War II, he engaged in drama, criticism and reviewing. • The Family Reunion (1939) • Language of drawing-room conversation • The Cocktail Party (1949) • The Confidential Clerk (1954) • The Elder Statesman (1959) • Sophisticated social comedies • In 1948, he received the Nobel Prize forliterature and the British Order of Merit from King George VI.

  6. The Critic • Literary criticism: • The Sacred Wood (1920) • Tradition and the Individual Talent (1922) • Social criticism: • The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) • Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1943)

  7. The Waste Land • It carries poetry into the 20th century, leaving Victorian manners behind. • It is the central work to the modernist tradition: • the modern artist’s disillusion with the modern world; • the desperate need and search for a new tradition. • It expresses the culmination of Eliot’s nihilism: • he sees only ruins and desolation around him; • he is concerned with aspects of the decay of western civilization that followed World War II.

  8. A Mythical Structure • Fragmentation = a reflection of the fragmentation of contemporary culture • Central metaphor  the spiritual dryness and sterility of modern life • The poem brings together images • of modern decadence from ancients myths • The order of the myth is projected on to the chaos of modern life.

  9. Eliot’s Sources • Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890) • Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920) • it relates ancient fertility myths and rites to the • rituals of early Christianity, and then to the • medieval romances of the Holy Grail. • there is a waste land, the ruler of which, the • Fisher King, has brought sterility to the land, due to • his impotence or death.

  10. Eliot’s Method • Lack of traditional structure. • Its five, unequal sections show no realistic or logical continuity. • The time-shifts and the lack of a narrative sequence reveal Eliot’s • stream-of-consciousness technique. •  free associations of thoughts in the human mind • Eliot uses allusions to 35 writers, in six languages, and to various philosophers and religious traditions. • The poem is written in free verse.

  11. The Burial of the Dead • The first section of the poem: • It opens with the coming of spring as a cruel thing. • The contrast aridity/fertility is established in a series of images, which describe a fragmented and sterile world. • This culminates in the London crowd crossing London Bridge on a foggy winter morning, resembling the souls of the damned in Dante’s Inferno: • Unreal City, • Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, • A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, • I had not thought death had undone so many.

  12. The Second and Third Sections • A Game of Chess  the contrast is evident in two scenes: • opulence and decadence, a richly decorated interior, a woman expresses her frustration in a monologue; • the same ideas on a popular level, in a London pub. • The Fire Sermon  the River Thames is shown in its squalor and • filth. The central scene is the seduction of a London typist by a City • clerk = modern sex without love. The central figure is Tiresias. There • are allusions to Saint Augustine and Buddha.

  13. Death by Water • The fourth section of the poem: • Phlebas, the Phoenician Sailor drowned in the sea, is the link to the first part of the poem; • The imagery of the sea comes from Shakespeare’s • The Tempest regeneration through water; • Phlebas is drowned and taken in a whirlpool. •  this process leads him to forget his previous life and become a part of nature.

  14. What the Thunder Said • The fifth and final section of the poem: • It begins with claps of thunder without bringing rain; • References and quotations point to the breakdown of civilisation.

  15. Eliot & Montale Eliot Montale The Waste LandMeriggiarepallido e assorto an American desert the sea coast of Liguria explicitly cosmopolitan a domestic intimate feeling The same desolate landscape

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